Women and the Railway, 1850-1915
Examines cultural representations of women’s experience of the railway in the nineteenth century
Examining the representation of women in the spaces of the railway in literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book explores the extraordinary and unprecedented opportunities that the train offered women. An emblem of the conquest of national and imperial space and of the staggering advances of science and technology, the train gave women a taste of its omnipotence, eventually becoming a space of emancipation, transgression, and fear for women. The book brings together the sensation, mystery, realist, and early modernist railway narratives by female and male authors, analysing women’s trajectories within and beyond the city and the nation, as urban passengers, travellers, tourists, and colonists. In texts by authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Ward, Flora Annie Steel, and Mona Caird as well as Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, the ambiguous space of the railway highlights the artificiality of the private/public divide, while giving rise to woman’s impulse to traverse boundaries, not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. In the novels, short stories in periodicals, news items and commentaries, essays, illustrations, and paintings examined, trains become contact zones of multiple encounters, battlefields of gender, class, and imperial ideology.
Key features
The first full-length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British, European and Imperial context
Explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings and illustrations
Concentrates on many understudied writers of the nineteenth century
Includes 9 images to help illustrate the study

Anna Despotopoulou is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century English fiction.

"1120346738"
Women and the Railway, 1850-1915
Examines cultural representations of women’s experience of the railway in the nineteenth century
Examining the representation of women in the spaces of the railway in literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book explores the extraordinary and unprecedented opportunities that the train offered women. An emblem of the conquest of national and imperial space and of the staggering advances of science and technology, the train gave women a taste of its omnipotence, eventually becoming a space of emancipation, transgression, and fear for women. The book brings together the sensation, mystery, realist, and early modernist railway narratives by female and male authors, analysing women’s trajectories within and beyond the city and the nation, as urban passengers, travellers, tourists, and colonists. In texts by authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Ward, Flora Annie Steel, and Mona Caird as well as Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, the ambiguous space of the railway highlights the artificiality of the private/public divide, while giving rise to woman’s impulse to traverse boundaries, not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. In the novels, short stories in periodicals, news items and commentaries, essays, illustrations, and paintings examined, trains become contact zones of multiple encounters, battlefields of gender, class, and imperial ideology.
Key features
The first full-length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British, European and Imperial context
Explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings and illustrations
Concentrates on many understudied writers of the nineteenth century
Includes 9 images to help illustrate the study

Anna Despotopoulou is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century English fiction.

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Women and the Railway, 1850-1915

Women and the Railway, 1850-1915

by Anna Despotopoulou
Women and the Railway, 1850-1915

Women and the Railway, 1850-1915

by Anna Despotopoulou

Hardcover

$120.00 
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Overview

Examines cultural representations of women’s experience of the railway in the nineteenth century
Examining the representation of women in the spaces of the railway in literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book explores the extraordinary and unprecedented opportunities that the train offered women. An emblem of the conquest of national and imperial space and of the staggering advances of science and technology, the train gave women a taste of its omnipotence, eventually becoming a space of emancipation, transgression, and fear for women. The book brings together the sensation, mystery, realist, and early modernist railway narratives by female and male authors, analysing women’s trajectories within and beyond the city and the nation, as urban passengers, travellers, tourists, and colonists. In texts by authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Ward, Flora Annie Steel, and Mona Caird as well as Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, the ambiguous space of the railway highlights the artificiality of the private/public divide, while giving rise to woman’s impulse to traverse boundaries, not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. In the novels, short stories in periodicals, news items and commentaries, essays, illustrations, and paintings examined, trains become contact zones of multiple encounters, battlefields of gender, class, and imperial ideology.
Key features
The first full-length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British, European and Imperial context
Explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings and illustrations
Concentrates on many understudied writers of the nineteenth century
Includes 9 images to help illustrate the study

Anna Despotopoulou is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century English fiction.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780748676941
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication date: 03/03/2015
Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Pages: 216
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Anna Despotopoulou is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Athens, Greece, where she teaches nineteenth and twentieth-century English fiction. She is the co-editor of Henry James and the Supernatural (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Transforming Henry James (Cambridge Scholars, 2013), and Reconstructing Pain and Joy (Cambridge Scholars, 2008) and author of many articles on Victorian literature and culture.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Illustrations; Introduction; Chapter 1: Geographies of Fear in the Age of Sensation; I. Ephemeral Chills and Thrills; II. Sensational Women and the Railway: Accidents, Risks, and Speculations in Ellen Wood, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Margaret Oliphant; III. Death by Railway: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Wyllard’s Weird; Chapter 2: Railway Speed; I. Fast and Forward: Women and Railway Manners; II. Trains to Perdition: Transgressive Transit in Rhoda Broughton, Dora Russell, and Margaret Oliphant; III. Urban Speed: Women and Traffic in Henry James’s London Underground; Chapter 3: Breaching National Borders: Rail Travel in Europe and Empire; I. Women and Railway Tourism in Anthony Trollope and Henry James; II. Imperial Railways; III. The Canadian Pacific Railway and Mrs Humphry Ward ; IV. ‘In the Permanent Way of Civilization’: Flora Annie Steel and the Railway in India; Chapter 4: Railway Space and Time; I. Industrial Traffic ; II. Railway Time – Trains of Thought; III. Modernist Railway Anxieties; Coda: Mrs Bathurst and Mrs Brown; Bibliography; Index
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