Overview

From 1830 onwards, railway infrastructure and novel infrastructure worked together to set nineteenth-century British society moving in new directions. At the same time, they introduced new periods of relative stasis into everyday life – whether waiting for a train or for the next instalment of a serial – that were keenly felt. Here, Nicola Kirkby maps out the plot mechanisms that drive canonical nineteenth-century fiction by authors including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and E. M. Forster. Her cross-disciplinary approach, as enjoyable to follow as it is thorough, draws logistical challenges of multiplot, serial, and collaborative fiction into dialogue with large-scale public infrastructure. If stations, termini, tracks and tunnels reshaped the way that people moved and met both on and off the rails in the nineteenth century, Kirkby asks, then what new mechanisms did these spaces of encounter, entanglement, and disconnection offer the novel?

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9781009295574

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Nicola Kirkby held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London until 2023, investigating nineteenth-century infrastructure and literary culture, and now manages a diversifying data visualisation centre at City St George's, University of London. Her works include a forthcoming historical resource, Nineteenth-Century Communications, and, as Guest Editor, a special issue of 19 entitled “Nineteenth-Century Infrastructures” (November 2023).

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