Trains, Culture, and Mobility: Riding the Rails - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0739167499 ISBN 13: 9780739167496

Publisher: Lexington Books, 2011

Synopsis

Trains, Culture and Mobility: Riding the Rails goes beyond textual representations of rail travel to engage an impressive range of political, sociological and urban theory. Taken together, these essays highlight the complexity of the modern experience of train mobility, and its salient relation to a number of cultural discourses. Incorporating traditionally marginal areas of cultural production such as graffiti, museums, architecture or even plunging into the social experience of travel inside the traincar itself, each essay constitutes an attempt to work from the act of riding the train toward questions of much larger significance. Crisscrossing cultures from the New World and Old, from East and West, these essays share a common preoccupation with the way in which trains and railway networks have mapped and re-mapped the contours of both cities and states in the modern period. Bringing together individual and large-scale social practices, this volume traces out the cultural implications of "Riding the Rails."

About this title

Review

Trains, Culture and Mobility: Riding the Rails is an exemplary piece of interdisciplinary scholarship which shows the value of a cultural theory grounded in the particularities of cultural history. Incorporating the study of photography, architecture, publicity material and everyday practices and phenomena, it manages to be extremely broad-ranging in its geographical and thematic scope while retaining an unusual level of coherence for an edited collection. It is also pleasingly quirky and distinctive in its concerns, from train graffiti to cell phone etiquette.--Joe Moran, Liverpool John Moores University, UK

About the Author

Benjamin Fraser is assistant professor of Spanish at The College of Charleston, South Carolina. He is also the author of the monographs Disability Studies and Spanish Culture (Liverpool UP, forthcoming), Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience (Bucknell UP, 2011) and Encounters with Bergson(ism) in Spain (U North Carolina P, 2010) as well as the editor and translator of Deaf History and Culture in Spain (Gallaudet UP, 2009). Steven D. Spalding is assistant professor of French at Christopher Newport University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0739167499
• ISBN 13: 9780739167496
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 322
• Editor: Fraser Benjamin, Spalding Steven D.