![]() New fears and anxieties emerge from the experience of train travel and the press coverage of crashes new illnesses such as railway spine and railway brain began to capture the public’s attention. As his study explored, this machine culture reshapes human social relationships in profound ways. Undoubtedly, the expansion of a physical infrastructure for railway transportation is made possible by, and further develops, a new fusion of social space, temporality, and technology. ![]() Schivelbusch’s oft-repeated insights into the machine ensemble and the compartment forge the coordinates for understanding a new social consciousness that arises with the railway. Though it has sometimes been seen in purely historical terms, his study is increasingly a point of origin for twenty-first-century cultural and transnational investigations of the train. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century ( 1986) is a primary touchstone for this book. Each theorist, in his own way, humanizes and broadens what might otherwise be a dry, historical, or instrumentalist accounting of the contradictions and consequences inherent in technological shifts. These books-and the subsequent studies that have relied on them explicitly and implicitly-included compelling analyses of the changing social relationships that have long accompanied locomotive power. The Railway Journey, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch ( 1986), and The Machine in the Garden, by Leo Marx (1988), have both been privileged in the cultural study of trains. Throughout highlighting various and sundry texts devoted to the scholarly study of train travel, we begin by acknowledging two key points of reference. Steering readers toward brief summaries of the individual chapters that make up this book, the present introduction sets the coordinates for our journey. The result is an ambitious volume that appeals to a global readership and forges a new line of interdisciplinary and transnational scholarship on the cultural representations of the railroad. Contributors to the volume themselves hail from a variety of global contexts, including Argentina, England, India, and the United States. The chapters cover railway cultures in and across Argentina, Catalonia, China, England, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mongolia, Russia, Scotland, South Korea, Spain, and the United States, with each chapter dealing with at least two if not three of these areas. This volume’s ten chapters investigate the dual role of trains as both artistic symbols and social realities as they figure into avant-garde music, poetry, fiction, travelogues, film, and visual art from selected spaces across the globe. Transnational Railway Cultures accomplishes two interlinked goals: it shifts the cultural study of trains into a transnational mode, and it prioritizes representations of the rail experience in a wide range of humanities texts.
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