Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity

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?

Author: Ian Carter
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 09/01/2001
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 9.18h x 6.20w x 0.73d
ISBN: 9780719059667

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 12/01/2001 pg. 152

About the Author
Ian Carter is Professor of Sociology at University of Auckland