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Since the advent of train travel, railways have compressed space and crossed national boundaries to become transnational icons, evoking hope, dread, progress, or obsolescence in different cultural domains. Spanning five continents and a diverse range of contexts, this collection offers an unprecedentedly broad survey of global representations of trains. From experimental novels to Hollywood blockbusters, the works studied here chart fascinating routes across a remarkably varied cultural landscape.
” [This] edited volume will be of interest to historians of technology as it engages with concepts usually analyzed by the discipline. The notion of techno-scientific progress (and its persistence) is the most visible (with trains assuming the role of icon of modernity, contrasting with the backwardness embodied in characters and landscapes surrounding them).” • Technology and Culture
“Using interdisciplinary methods, the stimulating essays in this collection consider the ways that a wide variety of cultural texts represent the experience of train travel across national borders.” • Sunny Stalter-Pace, Auburn University
“A welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the cultural history of the railway, expanding the scope of inquiry geographically and culturally. All in all, a fascinating exploration of trains, cultures, nations, and passengers confronting borders, mobility, and migration.” • Anna Despotopoulou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Introduction
Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding
Chapter 1. The Railway Arts: Sound and Space Beyond Borders
Aimée Boutin
Chapter 1 Appendix
Chapter 2. The Sonic Force of the Machine Ensemble: Transnational Objectification in Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988)
Benjamin Fraser
Chapter 3. A Genealogy of Apocalyptic Trains: Snowpiercer and Its Precursors in the Transnational Literature of Transport
John D. Schwetman
Chapter 4. Dangerous Borders: Modernization and the Gothic Mode in Horror Express (1972) and Howl (2015)
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, and Juan Juvé
Chapter 5. Anachronism, Ambivalence, and (Trans)National Self-reference: Tracking the English Literary Chunnel from 1986 on
Heather Joyce
Chapter 6. Crossing Borders On and Beyond the Train in Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989)
Steven D. Spalding
Chapter 7. The Cosmopolitan Writer: Exploring Representations on the Underground Railways of Buenos Aires and Paris through Julio Cortázar
Dhan Zunino Singh
Chapter 8. Literary Railway Bazaars: Transnational Discourses of Difference and Nostalgia in Contemporary India
Abhishek Chatterjee
Chapter 9. Memories of Trains and Trains of Memory: Journeys from Past-Futures to Present-Pasts in El Tren de la Memoria (2005)
Araceli Masterson-Algar
Chapter 10. Nord-Sud: The Parisian Metro and Transnational Avant-Garde Artistic Mobilities and Movements in Early Twentieth-Century Paris
Scott D. Juall
Conclusion: Mind the Gap
Benjamin Fraser and Steven D. Spalding