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The 19th-century steam railway epitomized modernity's relentlessly onrushing advance. Ian Carter delves into the cultural impact of the train. Why, for example, did Britain possess no great railway novel? He compares fiction and images by canonical British figures (Turner, Dickens, Arnold Bennett) with selected French and Russian competitors: Tolstoy, Zola, Monet, Manet. He argues that while high cultural work on the British steam railway is thin, British popular culture did not ignore it. Detailed discussions of comic fiction, crime fiction, and cartoons reveal a popular fascination with railways tumbling from vast (and hitherto unexplored) stores of critically overlooked genres.
The First World War is a watershed in the intellectual and spiritual history of the modern world. On the one hand, it brought an end to a sense of optimism and decency bred by the prosperity of nineteenth-century Europe. On the other, it brought forth a sense of futility and alienation that has since pervaded European thought. That cataclysmic experience is richly reflected in the work of writers and artists from both sides of the conflict, and this study provides a detailed analysis of two basic themes -- death and degradation -- that mark the literature about the war. From their accounts most men entered the war lightheartedly, filled with ideals of patriotism and glory, but these generous...
For over twenty-five years, the English Novel Explication series has been providing students and teachers of literature and reference librarians with a thorough, easy-to-use reference to interpretations of works by novelists from the United Kingdom. The explications cited in these volumes are interpretations of the significance and the meaning of the novels, and can range from discussions of theme, imagery, or symbolism to diction or structure. All critical stances, including post-structuralist, deconstructionist, and semiotic, are included. Quick access to the material is provided via integrated author/title indexes. Organization is alphabetical by novelist, with authors followed by an alphabetical list of their works and dates of publication. Explications are cited by last name of author, and include title and page references, while a complete list of books and periodicals indexed follows the text.
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This book delineates the unique role of Arnold Bennett in the transformation of the British novel from the aesthetic, psychological, and sociopolitical assumptions of modernity to those of modernism. Early in his career, Bennett believed that the rejection of inherited traditions and authorities that was promulgated by such champions of modernity as Darwin, Marx, and even Herbert Spencer, would culminate in an assertion of personal autonomy. Bennett eventually assimilated the modernist critique of modernity, which discovered (with the help of Freud and the First World War) an intractable human irrationality that expressed itself in the most apparently reasonable schemes for human improvement.
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