Humanities & Social Sciences

Railways and culture in Britain

The epitome of modernity

by Ian Carter, Jeffrey Richards

Description

The nineteenth-century's steam railway epitomised modernity's relentlessly onrushing advance. In Railways and culture in Britain Ian Carter delves into the cultural impact of train technology, and how this was represented in British society. Why, for example, did Britain possess no great railway novel? The book's first half tests that assertion by comparing fiction and images by some canonical British figures (Turner, Dickens, Arnold Bennett) with selected French and Russian competitors: Tolstoy, Zola, Monet, Manet. The second half proposes that if high cultural work on the British steam railway is thin, then this does not mean that all British culture ignored this revolutionary artefact. Detailed discussions of comic fiction, crime fiction and cartoons reveal a popular fascination with railways tumbling from vast (and hitherto unexplored) stores of critically overlooked genres. A final chapter contemplates cultural correlations of the steam railway's eclipse. If this was the epitome of modernity, then does the triumph of diesel and electric trains, of cars and planes, signal a decisive shift to postmodernity? ;

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Author Biography

Ian Carter is Professor of Sociology at University of Auckland; Jeffrey Richards is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University

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Bibliographic Information

  • Publisher Manchester University Press
  • Publication Date September 2001
  • Orginal LanguageEnglish
  • ISBN/Identifier 9780719059667
  • Publication Country or regionUnited Kingdom
  • FormatPaperback
  • Primary Price 35 USD
  • Pages352
  • ReadershipGeneral/trade
  • Publish StatusPublished
  • Dimensions234 X 156 mm
  • IllustrationIllustrations, black & white
  • SeriesStudies in Popular Culture
  • Reference CodeIPR1961

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