Trains, Literature, and Culture Reading and Writing the Rails

Trains, Literature and Culture: Reading/Writing the Rails delves into the rich connections between rail travel and the creation of cultural products from short stories to novels, from photographs to travel guides, and from artistic manifestos of the avant-garde to Freud's psychology. Each of the contributions engages in critical readings of textual or visual representations of trains across a wide spectrum of time periods and traditions-from English and American to Mexican, West African and European literary cultures. By turns trope, metaphor, and emblem of technological progress, these textual and visual representations of the train serve at times to index racial and gender inequalities, to herald the arrival of a nation's independence, and at still others to evince the trauma of industrialization. In each instance, the figure of the train emerges as a complex narrative form engaged by artists who were ;Reading & Writing the Rails ; as a way of assessing the competing discursive investments of cultural modernity.

Benjamin Fraser is assistant professor of Spanish at The College of Charleston. He is currently the managing editor of the: Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies; the author of the monographs Disability Studies and Spanish Culture, Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience, and Encounters with Bergson(ism) in Spain; as well as the editor and translator of Deaf History and Culture in Spain. Steven D. Spalding is assistant professor of French at Christopher Newport University. He has published on topics related to French literary and cultural studies in a number of scholarly journals and collections.