This volume examines the train trope in a variety of cultural, literary and linguistic contexts, from contemporary crime fiction and dystopian graphic narratives to postcolonial railway travelogues, by employing a range of methods and frameworks. Situated within the “Discourse, Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics” collection, the book critically engages with significant areas such as discourse and narrative structure. Interpreting the railway as a powerful cultural and imaginary site in the English-speaking world that traverses a range of creative domains, this study explores the ways in which the train and its structures, symbols and metaphors are textually rendered and the type of stylistic effects they generate in readers. It introduces, frames and discusses the idea of railway discourse and focuses on specific case studies (The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, the graphic novel Snowpiercer and Monisha Rajesh’s Around India in 80 Trains). In particular, it considers how a compartment window can constrain, and shape, the point of view of a narrator, the way in which science fiction trains are conceptually imagined, and the intercultural implications of rail travel writing in India today. To analyse the role and meaning of the railway in these texts, and compare them with others, this work adopts and adapts analytical tools and critical concepts from the integration of different fields, such as stylistics and linguistics, postcolonial criticism and literary studies.

Drawing on discourse analysis as an emerging field in transport and urban development, this innovative book takes a novel approach to examining the different interpretations, diversity of views and controversy in society.

This book provides an in-depth exploration of trains and train travel. Letherby and Reynolds have conducted extensive research with all those concerned with trains, from leisure travelers and enthusiasts to railway workers and commuters. Overturning conventional wisdom, they show that the train has a social life in and of itself and is not simply a way to get from A to B.The book also looks at the depiction of train travel through cultural media, such as music, films, books and art. The authors consider the personal politics of train travel and political discussion surrounding the railways, as well as the relationship trains have to leisure and work. The media often paints a gloomy picture of the railways and there is a general view that the romance of train travel ended with the steam locomotive. Letherby and Reynolds show that this is far from the case.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the newly formed country of Czechoslovakia built an ambitious national rail network out of what remained of the obsolete Habsburg system. While conceived as a means of knitting together a young and ethnically diverse nation-state, these railways were by their very nature a transnational phenomenon, and as such they simultaneously articulated and embodied a distinctive Czechoslovak cosmopolitanism. Drawing on evidence ranging from government documents to newsreels to train timetables, Iron Landscapes gives a nuanced account of how planners and authorities balanced these two imperatives, bringing the cultural history of infrastructure into dialogue with the spatial history of Central Europe.

This anthology critically analyzes how cultures around the world make social categories of race, class, gender and sexuality meaningful in particular ways. The collection uses a wide range of readings to examine how contemporary issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality are constructed, mobilized, and transformed. Unlike many books in this area, the U.S. is not analytical center.

The fascinating story of the network that made modern India The railways brought modernity to India. Its vast network connected the far corners of the subcontinent, making travel, communication and commerce simpler than ever before. Even more importantly, the railways played a large part in the making of the nation: by connecting historically and geographically disparate regions and people, it forever changed the way Indians lived and thought, and eventually made a national identity possible. This engagingly written, anecdotally told history captures the immense power of a business behemoth as well as the romance of train travel; tracing the growth of the railways from the 1830s (when the first plans were made) to Independence, Bibek Debroy and his co-authors recount how the railway network was built in India and how it grew to become a lifeline that still weaves the nation together. This latest volume in The Story of Indian Business series will delight anyone interested in finding out more about the Indian Railways.

Railway travel has had a significant influence on modern theatre's sense of space and time. Early in the 20th century, breakthroughs--ranging from F.T. Marinetti's futurist manifestos to epic theatre's use of the treadmill--explored the mechanical rhythms and perceptual effects of railway travel to investigate history, technology, and motion. After World War II, some playwrights and auteur directors, from Armand Gatti to Robert Wilson to Amiri Baraka, looked to locomotion not as a radically new space and time but as a reminder of obsolescence, complicity in the Holocaust, and its role in uprooting people from their communities. By analyzing theatrical representations of railway travel, this book argues that modern theatre's perceptual, historical and social productions of space and time were stretched by theatre's attempts to stage the locomotive.