The 19th-century's steam railway epitomized modernity's relentlessly onrushing advance. In this work 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 work's first half tests that assertion by comparing fiction and images by some canonical British figures (Turner, Dickens, Arnold Bennett) against 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?
- ISBN10 0719059658
- ISBN13 9780719059650
- Publish Date 6 September 2001 (first published 1 September 2001)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 9 November 2006
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Manchester University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 352
- Language English