Synopses & Reviews
Examines cultural representations of women's experience of the railway in a period of heightened mobilityWomen's experiences of locomotion during a period of increased physical mobility and urbanisation are explored in this monograph. The 5 chapters analyse Victorian and early Modernist texts which concentrate on women in transit by train, including Wilkie Collins's No Name, George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton and The Wings of the Dove, and stories by Rhoda Broughton, Margaret Oliphant, Charles Dickens and Katherine Mansfield. They highlight the tension between women's boundless physical, emotional, and sexual aspiration - often depicted as closely related to the freedom and speed of train travel - and Victorian gender ideology which constructed the spaces of the railway as geographies of fear or manipulation.
Key features:
The first full-length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British and European context
Explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings, and philosophical writings
Proposes a reconceptualization of the public/private binary
Synopsis
Examining the representation of women in the spaces of the railway in literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book explores the extraordinary and unprecedented opportunities that the train offered women.
Synopsis
Examines cultural representations of women's experience of the railway in the nineteenth century
Examining the representation of women in the spaces of the railway in literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book explores the extraordinary and unprecedented opportunities that the train offered women. An emblem of the conquest of national and imperial space and of the staggering advances of science and technology, the train gave women a taste of its omnipotence, eventually becoming a space of emancipation, transgression, and fear for women. The book brings together the sensation, mystery, realist, and early modernist railway narratives by female and male authors, analysing women's trajectories within and beyond the city and the nation, as urban passengers, travellers, tourists, and colonists. In texts by authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Ward, Flora Annie Steel, and Mona Caird as well as Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, the ambiguous space of the railway highlights the artificiality of the private/public divide, while giving rise to woman's impulse to traverse boundaries, not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. In the novels, short stories in periodicals, news items and commentaries, essays, illustrations, and paintings examined, trains become contact zones of multiple encounters, battlefields of gender, class, and imperial ideology.
Key features
- The first full-length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British, European and Imperial context
- Explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings and illustrations
- Concentrates on many understudied writers of the nineteenth century
- Includes 9 images to help illustrate the study
Anna Despotopoulou is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century English fiction.
Synopsis
Examines cultural representations of women's experience of the railway in the nineteenth century GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup( 'ISBN:9780748676965', 'ISBN:9780748676958', 'ISBN:9780748676941']);
Examining the representation of women in the spaces of the railway in literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book explores the extraordinary and unprecedented opportunities that the train offered women. An emblem of the conquest of national and imperial space and of the staggering advances of science and technology, the train gave women a taste of its omnipotence, eventually becoming a space of emancipation, transgression, and fear for women. The book brings together the sensation, mystery, realist and early modernist railway narratives by female and male authors, analysing women's trajectories within and beyond the city and the nation, as urban passengers, travellers, tourists and colonists.
In texts by authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Ward, Flora Annie Steel and Mona Caird as well as Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and Henry James, the ambiguous space of the railway highlights the artificiality of the private/public divide, while giving rise to woman's impulse to traverse boundaries, not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. In the novels, short stories in periodicals, news items and commentaries, essays, illustrations and paintings examined, trains become contact zones of multiple encounters, but also battlefields of gender, class and imperial ideology.
Key features:
- The first full-length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British and European context
- Explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings, and illustrations
- Proposes a reconceptualization of the public/private binary
- Concentrates on many understudied writers of the nineteenth century
- Includes 9 images to help illustrate the study
About the Author
Anna Despotopoulou joined the Faculty of English Studies, University of Athens, in 2002 and is now tenured Assistant Professor of English Literatureand Culture. She holds degrees in English Studies from the University of Athens (BA, 1991), the University of Oxford (Christ Church) (M.Phil., 1993), and the University of Reading (Ph.D., 1998). She is the co-editor of
Henry James and the Supernatural, co-edited with Kimberly C. Reed (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011),
Reconstructing Pain and Joy: Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives, co-edited with Chryssoula Lascaratou and Elly Ifantidou (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), and of T
ransforming Henry James, co-edited with Donatella Izzo and Anna Di Biasio.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1: Geographies of Fear in the Age of Sensation;
I. Ephemeral Chills and Thrills;
II. Sensational Women and the Railway: Accidents, Risks, and Speculations in Ellen Wood, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Margaret Oliphant;
III. Death by Railway: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Wyllard's Weird;
Chapter 2: Railway Speed;
I. Fast and Forward: Women and Railway Manners;
II. Trains to Perdition: Transgressive Transit in Rhoda Broughton, Dora Russell, and Margaret Oliphant;
III. Urban Speed: Women and Traffic in Henry James's London Underground;
Chapter 3: Breaching National Borders: Rail Travel in Europe and Empire;
I. Women and Railway Tourism in Anthony Trollope and Henry James;
II. Imperial Railways;
III. The Canadian Pacific Railway and Mrs Humphry Ward ;
IV. 'In the Permanent Way of Civilization': Flora Annie Steel and the Railway in India;
Chapter 4: Railway Space and Time;
I. Industrial Traffic ; II. Railway Time - Trains of Thought;
III. Modernist Railway Anxieties; Coda: Mrs Bathurst and Mrs Brown;
Bibliography
Index