Trains, Literature, and Culture

Reading and Writing the Rails

Contributions by Roxanna Curto, Beth Muellner, Alessio Lerro, Claudie Massicotte, Claudia May, Scott Palmer, Matt Thompson, Michael Velez Edited by Steven D. Spalding, Benjamin Fraser

Publication date:

29 December 2011

Length of book:

230 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739165607

Trains, Literature and Culture: Reading and Writing the Rails delves into the rich connections between rail travel and the creation of cultural products from short stories to novels, from photographs to travel guides, and from artistic manifestos of the avant-garde to Freud’s psychology. Each of the contributions engages in critical readings of textual or visual representations of trains across a wide spectrum of time periods and traditions—from English and American to Mexican, West African and European literary cultures. By turns trope, metaphor, and emblem of technological progress, these textual and visual representations of the train serve at times to index racial and gender inequalities, to herald the arrival of a nation’s independence, and at still others to evince the trauma of industrialization. In each instance, the figure of the train emerges as a complex narrative form engaged by artists who were “Reading & Writing the Rails” as a way of assessing the competing discursive investments of cultural modernity.

Introduction
Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding
Part I. Race, Class, and Gender
Chapter 1: Railroad Blues: Crossing the Tracks of Gender, Class and Race Inequities in the Blues and Ann Petry’s The Street
Claudia May
Chapter 2: Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers on the Railroad
Beth Muellner
Part II. Politics and Poetics
Chapter 3: Technology Transfer, the Railway and Independence in Ousmane Sembène’s Les Bouts de bois de Dieu
Roxanna Curto
Chapter 4: Futurist Trains: Aesthetics and Subjectivity in the Italian Avant-Garde
Alessio Lerro
Part III. Visual Cultures
Chapter 5: Sublime Hieroglyphics: The Pacific Coast Views 1867-1872 of Carleton Watkins
Scott Palmer
Chapter 6: Modernity, Anxiety and the Development of a Popular Railway Landscape Aesthetic, 1809-1879
Matt Thompson
Part IV. New Critical Transfers
Chapter 7: Mapping Memory Through the Railway Network: Reconsidering Freud’s Metaphors from the Project for a Scientific Psychology to Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Claudie Massicotte
Chapter 8: Killer Trains and Thrilling Travels: the Spectacle of Mobility in Zola and Proust
Steven D. Spalding
Part V. Economics and Power
Chapter : Class and Counterfeiting during the Porfiriato: Gutiérrez Nájera’s “The Streetcar Novel”
José Eduardo González
Chapter 10: Train, Trestle, Ticker: Railroad and Region in Frank Norris’s The Octopus and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and The Don
Michael Velez

After generations of narrowly based scholarship, railways are now receiving the attention they deserve from scholars across the humanities able to unpack the culturally complex textures and spaces of transport, travel and mobility. This collection of essays makes a most important contribution towards this task. Theoretically informed and broad in historical and thematic scope, this book provide a set of fascinating insights into the intricate relationships between railways, mobilities and the cultures of modernity.