Schivelbusch railway journey pdf full#
Schivelbusch railway journey pdf free#

Having read much more widely, I also saw how influential he had been on a generation of scholarship. The Railway Journey held up well, although I now saw how the second part really did pale compared to those first few critical chapters.

Schivelbusch featured twice on my comprehensive examination reading list.

My PhD also returned to railways, but not in the way that I think Schivelbusch would have expected. I ultimately fell back into railway history during my MA, albeit from a material culture and memory perspective. I studied and wrote about Victorian railway travel as an undergrad because of his work. Chapters 3-5, which focus on time and space, are probably more cited than any other work of transportation history (my guess, don't know if this is actually true!). This was how people saw train travel, how they felt train travel, how they loved and feared it. He introduced me to the cultural history of rail travel, which helped me to break away from the technical and economic narratives I had been used to. Whatever aspect of the railways that Schivelbusch wanted to talk about, he did. It's a truly eclectic book: the chapters don't lead logically from one to the next. My mind was blown.Īs I delved deeper into railway history, I bought a used copy of The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, perhaps Schivelbusch's best-known work. The increased velocity of rail travel allowed people to travel further in less time. Using Schivelbusch, Wootton explained how the construction of the railways in Britain had fundamentally changed how people perceived time and space. I first encountered Schivelbusch in the first year of my undergrad in a lecture given by David Wootton on the history of time and space as intellectual constructs. It is no exaggeration to say that, were it not for his work, I might not have completed a PhD.

Schivelbusch railway journey pdf free#

As qualified as any professor, he operated free of institutional constraint, writing the histories he wanted to. Schivelbusch was what many of us dream of being: an independent scholar. I didn't know until this morning, when the New York Times published an obituary.

Now updated with a new preface, The Railway Journey is an invaluable resource for readers interested in nineteenth-century culture and technology and the prehistory of modern media and digitalization.Unbeknownst to many of us, Wolfgang Schivelbusch died in Germany in March.

Schivelbusch railway journey pdf full#

As a history of the surprising ways in which technology and culture interact, this book covers a wide range of topics, including the changing perception of landscapes, the death of conversation while traveling, the problematic nature of the railway compartment, the space of glass architecture, the pathology of the railway journey, industrial fatigue and the history of shock, and the railroad and the city.īelonging to a distinguished European tradition of critical sociology best exemplified by the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, The Railway Journey is anchored in rich empirical data and full of striking insights about railway travel, the industrial revolution, and technological change. In a highly original and engaging fashion, Schivelbusch discusses the ways in which our perceptions of distance, time, autonomy, speed, and risk were altered by railway travel. In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch examines the origins of this industrialized consciousness by exploring the reaction in the nineteenth century to the first dramatic avatar of technological change, the railroad. But this was not always the case as Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out in this fascinating study, our adaptation to technological change-the development of our modern, industrialized consciousness-was very much a learned behavior. The impact of constant technological change upon our perception of the world is so pervasive as to have become a commonplace of modern society.