The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble

ISBN-13: 9783039110247 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 280 str.

Freeman, Michael

Opis

Most research and writing on railway history has been undertaken in a way that disconnects it from the wider cultural milieu. Authors have been very effective at constructing specialist histories of transport, but have failed to register the railway s central importance in the representation and understanding of modernity. This book brings together contributions from a range of established scholars in a variety of disciplines with the central purpose of exploring the railway less as a transport technology than as a key signifier of capitalist modernity. It examines the complex social relations in which the railway became historically embedded, identifying it as a central problematic in the cultural experience of modernity. It avoids the limitations of both the close-sighted empiricism typical of many transport historians and the long-sighted generalizations of cultural commentators who view the railway merely as a shorthand for the concept of progress over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book draws on a diverse range of materials, including literary and historical forms of representation. It is also informed by a creative application of various critical theories."

Spis treści

Contents: Matthew Beaumont/Michael Freeman: Preface - Matthew Beaumont/Michael Freeman: Introduction: Tracks to Modernity - Ana Parejo Vadillo/John Plunkett: The Railway Passenger; or, The Training of the Eye - Patrick Keiller: Phantom Rides: The Railway and Early Film - Michael Freeman: Time and Space under Modernism: The Railway in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers - Andrew Thacker: Uncompleted Life: The Modernist Underground - Matthew Beaumont: Railway Mania: The Compartment as the Scene of a Crime - Laura Marcus: Psychoanalytic Training: Freud and the Railways - Adrian Gregory: To the Jerusalem Express: Wartime Commuters and Anti-Semitism - Wojciech Tomasik: The Auschwitz Terminus: Driverless Trains in Zola and Borowski - William Kidd: Sites of Memory, Sites of Modernity: French Railways in the Twentieth Century - Ian Carter: The Little World Where You Don't Live: Railway Modelling.

O autorze

The Editors: Matthew Beaumont is Lecturer in English at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (2005), and the editor of Adventures in Realism (2007).
Michael Freeman is Supernumerary Fellow in Human Geography at Mansfield College, University of Oxford. His principal publications include: Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World (2004); and Railways and the Victorian Imagination (1999), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year 1999 and short-listed for the Sally Hacker prize at Johns Hopkins, 2001.