Steam Train Research Articles

Pre-Raphaelite Wonderland: Christian Yandell’s Alice

REVOLUTION IN PAINT AND PENTHE NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS A TIME OF REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE IN BRITAIN- industrial, scientific, social and cultural upheaval drove heart of Empire to seek out new and challenge old. Within arts, J. M. W. Turner's impressionistic renderings of steam trains and retiring Trafalgar-era gunships turned a century-long tradition of landscape painting on its head and at same time proclaimed British art a world leader. Less revolutionary in technique, though more so in word and deed, was a group of young radical London-based artists who appeared mid-century, united in rebellion against Royal Academy training and artistic traditions of their birth. Calling themselves Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they sought to replicate nature's realism in a framework of contemporary, medieval, and high-literary subjects (Parris). Prominent members included Ford Madox Brown, William Holman Hunt, Elisabeth Eleanor Siddall, Edward Burne-Jones, child prodigy Charles Everett Millais, poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and print maker, writer, and prominent socialist William Morris.Casting aside in-vogue Academy style, Brotherhood announced arrival of a new art based on imagination; overtly Romantic, it reflected horror and ecstasy of dreams, and death, good and evil, mythology and alchemy, passion and love, with latter both won and lost. One commentator on Pre- Raphaelite art described it as an interesting mix of concern for moral issues of modern life alongside a celebration of the technical virtues of medieval art and romantic appeal of medieval history (Wilton 157-59). The movement gave rise to intensely realistic, brilliantly colored works laden with symbolic elements. Outof- doors en plein air painting was also promoted-a radical idea at time-and beauty of nature and humanity was presented in magical, often mythical settings. Exhibited Pre-Raphaelite works stood out from muted tones and softlines of those done in traditional and Academy styles.Though Brotherhood was short-lived-forming in 1848 as revolution swept through Europe and dissipating during 1860s-its influence was profound and ongoing. This was evidenced by subsequent rise of Symbolist art throughout Europe from 1870s through to 1910s, and a continuing interest in, and replication of, works in Pre-Raphaelite manner (Clare). This late nineteenthcentury child of Romanticism and Pre-Raphaelites rejected science, logic, and industrial revolution for a romanticized art and literature based on inner contemplation, spiritualism, and a deeper understanding of one's place in natural world. Both movements saw artists embracing medieval, including Arthurian legend with their tales of gallant knights coming to aid of virtuous women-reflecting their own search for meaning in industrialized age (Cheney). The Bible was an equally rich source for stories and moral guidance.Impressionism is usually presented as most influential art movement of second half of nineteenth century; however, Symbolist art was equally as revolutionary and more internationally dominant, with adherents such as Francisco de Goya, Eugene Delacroix, Edvard Munch, and Aubrey Beardsley adopting its philosophical constructs and fantastical content. Pinning these art movements down and unraveling their spider web-like network of connections is difficult more than a century later. The lines are now blurred, for example, between Pre-Raphaelitism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau, despite their spatial separations. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists took what they liked from what was on offer or had come before. The melding of Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist methods and motifs was an easy task for those not especially attracted to Impressionism or modernist trends.The formation of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had coincided with midcentury blossoming and democratization of photography, giving rise to more photographers and a greater variety of subjects. …

Man-Machine Systems Functioning Design and Modeling Methods in Optimization Processes Problems

The article describes the models and methods of design automation processes functioning man-machine systems based on functional-structural theory of man-machine systems and generalized structural method of prof. A.I. Gubinsky. Describes the basic concepts and definitions of the functional-structural theory. An algorithm for generating a series-parallel connection operations with the additional constraints, the algorithm generating alternatives process of man-machine systems based on the coincidence of the objectives of operations, the algorithm generating parametric alternatives based on a template. The basic concepts and definitions necessary for the generation algorithm of process fragments with the mandatory combinations of operations. Proposed the use of combinations of binding matrix operations, in which the nonzero elements of rows are meaningful only possible combinations of standard ways of performing the relevant functional units in alternatives. Introduced the concept of the composition and the concept of incompatibility steam trains, on the basis of which the distribution of functions performed compositions. Describes the integration of optimization models processes functioning man-machine systems with simulation method, as of the functional-structural theory is only applicable for processes without aftereffect and in the absence of dependent operations. Suggested remedy this limitation by integrating design technology processes functioning man-machine systems based on the functional-structural theory with the method of simulation of the process areas that are not fulfilled the above requirements of the functional-structural theory.

융합인재교육(STEAM) 수업에서 초등교사들이 겪는 어려움 분석

The purpose of this study is to provide basic data for improving the STEAM class by examining elementary school teachers' difficulties in the STEAM class and discussing solutions. For this research, 25 elementary school teachers in Seoul City and Gyeonggi-do were asked to write their difficulties in the STEAM class in the open-ended questionnaires. After classification of the collected data, an in-depth interview was conducted with one in-service elementary school teacher who is richly experienced in STEAM education to find solutions for each type of difficulties. The study result showed that most of elementary school teachers had difficulties in the STEAM class, due to selection of integrated subjects, production of teaching devices and materials, guidance of group activities, reorganization of the curriculum, assessment and uncooperative co-teachers. One teacher that participated in the interview to discuss solutions for teachers' difficulties was solving the problems in various ways. She said that many of her solutions came from her experience and also, knowledge obtained through a participation in the STEAM training or opportunities to share information with other teachers who belong to the STEAM research institution, was highly helpful.

Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World Edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji (review)

Reviewed by: Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World Edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji D. P. Martinez (bio) Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World. Edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2012. xxxi, 320 pages. $35.00, paper; $35.00, E-book. Fandom Unbound is a wonderful and welcome addition to the increasing body of work on Japanese popular culture and mass media. While some of the volume’s chapters are a few years out of date and the occasional need for a native English speaker to have proofread the text becomes apparent, these are minor quibbles to note about a volume that provides English-language readers with a predominantly Japanese perspective on an important aspect of its own society. The otaku (“your house,” in this case a Japanese man who spends his time at home on the computer and/or is obsessed with anime and manga) subculture, as Mizuko Ito notes in her introduction, “has evolved as a complex set of resistances and accommodations to modernity, mainstream culture, and other subcultures” (p. xxi). Not only has otaku culture evolved, but it has merged in other societies, particularly in the United [End Page 469] States, with local concepts such as that of the “nerd” to produce an international culture “grounded precisely in its ability to resist totalizing global narratives such as nationalism” (ibid., p. xviii). For social scientists, it is this international aspect of the new media technologies that is important: how do the growth in computer technologies, fan conventions, and individual appropriations lead to new creativities, relationships, hierarchies of knowledge, and connections around the world? While there does exist a literature exploring these issues from a Western perspective, led by the pioneering work of the sociologist Henry Jenkins on fandom,1 the work by Japanese social scientists is largely missing from this canon. Given that one of the very first publications on the Japanese mass media, The Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture,2 was coedited by the eminent Japanese sociologist Hidetoshi Kato, the omission of the Japanese perspective from the booming literature on Japan’s mass media is rather glaring. As Fandom Unbound illustrates, it is well worth becoming familiar with the work of Japanese specialists. The volume consists of an introduction by Ito and three sections: “Culture and Discourse,” “Infrastructure and Place,” and “Community and Identity,” each comprising four chapters. The topics covered by the first section include Izumi Tsuji’s study of “train” otaku as setting the scene for a discursive approach to a social history of the imagination; an excerpt from Hiroki Azuma’s book on otaku as “Database Animals”; Akihiro Kitada’s chapter on “Japan’s Cynical Nationalism”; and Lawrence Eng’s overview of the U.S. otaku scene, “Strategies of Engagement.” These chapters are fascinating for different reasons. Azuma’s database animals, for example, remind me of recent anthropological theories on the posthuman in postmodernity, while Tsuji’s study of how contemporary otaku culture owes something to early rail fanatics (or trainspotters) had me making various global connections. The fascination with trains is not solely Japanese—the Lumière brothers made L’Arrivèe d’un Train en Gare de la Ciotat (1895) as one of their first short films. This marvelous sequence of a steam train pulling into Ciotat station astounded audiences around the world in the late nineteenth century and was probably included in the selections of their work shown in Japan as early as 1898. The first narrative film, The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter in 1903, is another [End Page 470] example of how film as a mass medium immediately engaged with modern technologies and of how creative cross-fertilizations among these technologies are not confined to the postmodern era. In fact, Kitada’s chapter on cynical nationalism depicts the process of cross-fertilization in exemplary detail. This chapter looks at Densha otaku (Train man): a novel, manga, television series, and finally a film that began as Internet postings on the anarchic 2channel. The various narratives of how an otaku sought online advice in order to woo a beautiful young woman he met...

Mark Twain, Memory, and the Failures of Historicism

I want to begin with the rather simple statement that Mark Twain’s autobiographies—and here I am referring mostly to Life on the Mississippi and the text we now call the Autobiography—hold open the past as a resource for slowing down time. In itself this isn’t a highly provocative claim; I imagine that many would agree that we find in Twain’s work a desire to hold off futurity. I think, too, that it is fair to say that his continual return to the materials of the past is in part motivated by modernity’s culture of planned obsolescence. Obsolescence becomes an issue when the speed of “progress” requires a diminishing of the present in addition to the past. Temporality, under modernity, is organized into the past, present, and a horizon of expectation known as the future. The future increasingly encroaches on the present by directing our thinking and desires forward; Twain well understood the risks and anxiety of this minimized present through the market logic of investment. Planned obsolesce exploits such anxieties through the introduction of looming future dates of expiration. While ancient, dead forms of culture were of no interest to Twain, those still-working elements of the past had some attraction. The ability to use these elements, to repeat certain experiences, to laugh twice at the same joke: these are what he understands to be threatened by obsolescence.1 While we recognize the extent to which narrative has broken down in his Autobiography—it is precisely this feature that has made this text’s reputation— we might not immediately link this formal feature to Twain’s anxious response to modernity. If we carefully consider how individual moments of breakdown are framed and what they might contribute to any possible larger narrative structure and authorial strategy, we expose what I would like to suggest we recognize as narrative leftovers or remainders. These originate in, and are signifiers of, a failure to fall into line with the requirements of a certain temporal

Making the Underground Underground

Although we think of the Metropolitan Railway as the world’s first Underground, its distinctiveness lay as much in its metropolitan character as in its subterranean setting. This paper examines early representations of the Metropolitan and District as more, or less, underground than contemporaries might have expected, especially in controversies over air quality and light; in discourses associated with controversies over smoking, speed and ventilation; and in the implications, real and imagined, of alternating open and closed, light and dark sections of line. With the substitution of electric for steam trains in the early twentieth century, attempts to make the Underground less underground by opening up additional ventilation shafts were replaced by a longer-term trend of making the Underground more underground, ‘girdering’ over cuttings and building over stations, with corresponding implications for how the Underground was experienced.

Technology's Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism by Michael Cowan (review)

Reviewed by: Technology's Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism by Michael Cowan Ben Morgan Technology's Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism. Michael Cowan. London: Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, 2011. Pp. 252. $40.00 (paper). During their visit to Berlin from the U.S. in 1925, Sam Wooding and his orchestra recorded a version of the fox-trot "Alabamy Bound" that mimics both the whistle and the relentless drive of a steam train; their version encourages listeners literally to dance to the rhythms of the industrial era, yet the title of the song invokes a longing for a form of rootedness. Held together, for the three minutes that the song lasts, are the thrill of technological change and a deep desire for belonging. In Michael Cowan's fascinating account of German culture of the 1910s and 1920s, rhythm holds together in unstable union precisely these conflicting impulses, and it is the great merit of the book that it repeatedly demonstrates the surprising variety of ways in which this tension can be negotiated. For Ludwig Klages or for the proponents of rhythmic exercise at the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute in Hellerau, organic, wave-like rhythms were thought to be able to rescue the citizens of early twentieth-century Germany from the alienated and mechanized pounding of industrial society. For avant-garde filmmakers like Hans Richter or for the supporters of jazz who were filled with enthusiasm by Sam Wooding's concerts, mechanized rhythms could take those same citizens beyond themselves to find in the beat of the modern world exactly the sort of revivified, bodily engagement that for anti-modernists could be found only in a flight into the organic pulsing of wave and heart. Cowan's book skillfully avoids a number of traps that await the unwary student of this period of German history. He is sensitive to the way the term rhythm was "up for grabs" (42) in the period, causing him explicitly to challenge the reductive argument that invocations of rhythm in the period prepare the way for National Socialist versions of a racialized body culture. At the same time, his accounts of the rhythmic interrelations between experimental film and advertising, or between jazz and the sociology of labor, render neat dichotomies between high art and mass culture obsolete: intense engagements with the issues raised by rhythm can be found across the cultural spectrum. Indeed, some of the most thought provoking ideas about the rhythm of technology are to be found not where we might expect them—in, say, the work of Walter Benjamin—but in an essay by an advertising psychologist named Käthe Kurtzig published in 1926 in the trade journal Industrielle Psychotechnik. Kurztig comments on how the deployment of rhythm in an advertising film can lead to a "resonance" between film and viewer, an effect she captures with the German word Mitschwingen (130). Also writing in 1926, Fritz Pauli, the head of the Hamburg Phönix rubber factory, similarly discusses the compulsion to achieve "resonance," or what he calls, using a Latinate term, Resonanzzwang (133). In both cases, culture is viewed [End Page 796] as a visceral process that brings people together in shared bodily rhythms that can be managed and manipulated but also cultivated in ways that need not only increase profit or productivity. Cowan's book gives us the sense of culture as a shared corporeal activity, something that happens with and between bodies. To portray "culture"—from Stravinsky to driving—as a form of bodily activity is partly to sum up what modernist critics of modernity were themselves saying; think of Adorno's critique of Stravinsky and mass culture, or of Lawrence's critique in Lady Chatterley's Lover of "jazzing" and Proust as bad ways of living our physical being. But the material Cowan brings together is striking because the elegiac tone—readily found in Adorno or Lawrence—emerges as only one note among many. However, other aspects of Cowan's argument are presented in a more familiar manner. In the narrative he constructs, rhythm becomes especially important, because following Simmel and Benjamin he suggests that modernity produces an urban environment in which individuals are subject to...

Design Education Discussion for the STEAM training

Design Education Discussion for the STEAM training

Young Hearts Never Grow Old

Young Hearts Never Grow Old Kim Kyung-uk (bio) Translated by Deborah Elizabeth Ann Smith (bio) Jolted by the throbbing sound of machinery, the boy opened his eyes, awakening from a sleep where nothing sweet or pleasant had alleviated the cold, barren dreamscape. It was nonsense to call the waking world the opposite of dreams—the dream may have been cold, but the reality was even colder. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes with dirty, blistered fingers and had a look in the stove. Inside this stove, which he’d fashioned from an oil drum, the blackened firewood had burned almost completely down, so he fetched more from the store he kept in a paint can and arranged it on top of the dying embers. After making sure that the fire caught in the new kindling, he turned to look in the direction of the sofa. So far his grandfather’s eyes had remained tightly closed. The stove kindling, and his grandfather—every time he opened his eyes, the boy checked to make sure that the cold hadn’t finally snuffed the life out of them. There were times when he looked to the kindling first and others when his grandfather took precedence, but not once did he omit either one. He went out into the living room, his breath escaping in a great yawn. Something flickered on the far side of the rime-encrusted balcony window, and when he wiped away the icy crystals, the shape of a moving van appeared, its extending platform conveying household effects down to the ground. He stared glumly out of the [End Page 87] window before returning to the living room. From the short-legged table that stood behind the door, he took up a pencil and drew a picture on some sketch paper. Each line made a crisp sound as it appeared—the boy’s second-favorite sound in all the world. Wings spread, gliding pterosaurs assumed various poses. He narrowed his eyes and studied the winged creatures of the Mesozoic-Cretaceous; there was something missing. He pencilled in clouds above the heads of the pterodactyls. It looked good. Again, he cast an appraising eye over the picture. This time he drew cumulus clouds behind their tails. It looked even better. Turning the paper over, he began to copy out some characters, but as he was writing the second character the pencil lead snapped. He inserted the pencil into a sharpener, which was shaped like a steam train, but the stub just rotated uselessly, so he took it out and sharpened it with a razor blade. He gathered up the shavings carefully and put them into a can before he finished writing the character. Ornithocheirus. After rolling the sketch paper into a scroll, he tied it up with a piece of red yarn, knotting it into a bow. When someone knocked on the door, the boy emerged promptly from the living room as if he had been expecting a visitor, holding the rolled-up sketch paper in his hand. He stood in front of the mirror that hung on the front of the tall shoe cupboard. Begrimed with age, the mirror was cloudy, as though made not of glass but of something only semi-translucent. After smoothing his dishevelled hair with saliva-dampened fingers, he opened the door. A young woman stood before him; the woman from 504. She was alone. A shadow played over the boy’s face. - Your grandfather? - He’s sleeping. - Still? - Shall I wake him? - No. I just came to bring this. The woman set the apple crate down and pushed it in through the door. She glared inside over the boy’s head and he found [End Page 88] himself unable to draw back from her sharp gaze. Staring fixedly at the boy, her lips twitched as though she were about to speak, then she pressed them together firmly and turned to go. The boy fingered the sketch paper concealed behind his back. A little while later, the boy dashed out of the apartment at the sound of a vehicle, clattering down the dank stairwell and trampling through the sacks of rubbish strewn everywhere in the...

The ghost of injuries present in Dickens's The Signalman

Written in the aftermath of the Staplehurst rail disaster, Dickens's ghost story ‘The Signalman’ is often read for its uncanny insights into what would later come to be known as trauma theory. This paper revisits that text – in its focus on retrospection, belatedness, repetition and the disarticulation of event from consciousness – to consider the role of other, arguably less intense, but still traumatising experiences. For example, Dickens's fraught editorial relationship with Elizabeth Gaskell; specifically his decision to remove a reference to himself from Cranford that suggested his readers might suffer injury from writing that found its origins in an industrial process of steam and gear train. The ‘Signalman’ anachronistically unites two distinct events – Staplehurst and Gaskell's wounding characterisation – within a frame that is recursively haunted by material common to both: rail catastrophe, mortal threats to the public and private self, and fraught miscommunication.

An Interview with Simon Penny: Techno-Utopianism, Embodied Interaction and the Aesthetics of Behavior

In your writing you have criticized immersive Vr technologies for their dream of detachment from human flesh and their rhetoric of command and control. Do you think your critical assessment is relevant to today’s media artworks and communication technologies based on Vr? The 1990s was the formative decade for interactive art and digital culture, and throughout I critiqued both the technology and the rhetoric around the technology. Many theorists were expounding Utopian ideas of convergence, social harmony, world peace, spiritual redemption or collective intelligence. This worried me because while the technology was ostensibly new, the rhetoric was just another chapter in 200 years of techno-utopianism. Theodore Roszak quotes a poem about the steam train from the 1830s, “steel and her handmaid steam will make utopia only half a dream” and will “”¦bring peace on every line.” If you change key words to “Internet” and “Computer” it sounds like the rhetoric of the 1990s.(”¦)

Investing in efficient industrial boiler systems in China and Vietnam

Energy efficiency in industrial boiler steam systems can be very low due to old technologies, improper design and non-optimal operation of the steam systems. Solutions include efficiency assessments and investments in steam system optimizations, education and training for operators of the systems. This paper presents case studies on assessing and investing in boiler steam systems in China and Vietnam. Methodologies and approaches for data collection and analyses were designed specifically for each of the two countries. This paper concludes: (1) investing in energy efficiency in industrial boiler steam system in China and Vietnam are cost effective; (2) government should not sent national energy efficiency standards lower than that of energy companies or energy equipment manufactures.

Le Ferrovie e la costruzione dell'Italia Unita

The making of the Italian unification is strictly connected to the history of railways. Some lines were born few years after the invention of the train, starting with the Napoli-Portici line (1839). There were short and separated sections built independently by each State. Milano- Venezia was the first big railway built in the peninsula, within the Lombard-Veneto Reign belonging to the Austrian Empire. The improvements of railways in Europe were an indicator of rapid advance of land ways of communication but, at the same time, they enhanced the backwardness of the Italian situation. However, the idea of unification of the peninsula, at least territorial, to be accomplished by a network of railways, was borning for the most far-seeing minds: the matter of railways during the Risorgimento dealt with the creation of the national conscience. The project for a national network of railways started after the overcoming of the divisions in different states that led to the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy. From 1861 to 1865 the constructive effort was considerable. The important line Bologna-Ancona-Foggia, the Roma-Napoli via Cassino, the Roma-Orte-Ancona and the “Porrettana” from Bologna to Firenze were led to the end. Especially important was the period between 1865 and 1885. In 1865 was promulgated the law for the administrative unification of the Kingdom to give an order to railways and, in the same year, the network was divided between four big societies. After the creation of the spine of the country, was the turn of Alps. The first big tunnel was realized in that period: the Cenisio tunnel (finished in 1871). In 1884 the Gottardo tunnel was created, while the Sempione tunnel would have become effective in 1906. Meanwhile the creation of more than 6000 km of secondary railways was financed. The government reorganized in 1885 the Italian railways: the lines were concentrated in two networks disposed lengthwise in the peninsula. The Conventions had a sixty years long duration divided into three periods of twenty years: the cancellation of contracts was possible at the end of each period. In 1905, the first deadline, the management of railways was adopted by a single State company. Further interesting things as events concerning steam locomotives, carriages and train stations are connected with the development of the infrastructure. Small and medium-sized train stations laid down in an unique model in the whole nation created a common visual language. Big cities stations designed as architectonic projects that started to be part of urban scenography, intensified on the symbolic plane the role of unification and develop accomplished by railways.

The role of coal in the development of the Baltic and South China Sea regions

Compared to other energy sources, coal is typically regarded as dirty and inefficient. To many, it conjures images of the Industrial Revolution, steam ships, steam trains, appalling working conditions and loss of life in the mines, thick air and gritty eyes and noses in the western metropolises. In the Baltic Region, the use of coal is declining everywhere but Russia. These generally mature economies are successfully shifting to cleaner fuels. However, as much of the South China Sea region is in the midst of economic take-off and modernization, coal consumption is on the rise. The demand for electric power is soaring and coal seems to be the only way to produce the vast amounts of electricity required. This paper examines the production of coal within the South China Sea region and the shared need to attempt to minimise the carbon emissions resulting from the use of so much coal.

Tunnel ferroviaire de Vierzy : vieillissement, altération des maçonneries calcaires

The Vierzy railway tunnel was excavated in 1859-1860 in cuisan sands below 38 m of essentially lutetian limestones. The accident is due to the collapse of the roof of the tunnel on a 15 m long section and of about 4 m thick Lower lutetian formations. The initial cause of the collapse is a defect, at construction time, in the keystone zone of the masonry of the circular vault, at the joint between two sections of excavation. In 1914 a war destruction with explosives created a collapse and a « cathedral» 50 m long, 17 m high, and a cone of 10,000 m 3 debris at 20 m of the 1972 collapse. The shaking provoked the sinking of Lower lutetian formations on the masonry, at a distance, Middle Lutetian staying as a slab. Fumes of steam trains deposited soots with coal and sulphides (pyrite) particles in voids of the ground and of the mansory up to in cavernous mortar. This permitted a sulfuric acid alteration, increased by bacterial processes, changing carbonates into soluble sulfates (gypsum). It lowered the resistance of the vault and permitted the fall of quarry stones. At the inner surface freezing caused a progressive fall of debris and reduction of thickness of the masonry. Thin facing rolls of bricks or concrete were placed here and there as a protection. The removing of a section of such a roll of bricks, altered, to be substituted with concrete was the final cause. One limit of the removed section coincides with one limit of the collapse. On June 16, 1972, two passenger trains crossed into the tunnel at a small interval and collided with the cone of debris. There were 108 deaths. It is the third most important catastrophe in French railway history.

Dancing and Flying the Body Mechanical: Five Visions for the New Civilisation

This article explores Futurist technophilia and some more or less latent technophobia, in the period after 1918. Fuelled by the economic and industrial advancements of the so-called “Giolittian age,” as well as an extensive employment of war technology in the First World War, the Futurist technological imagination remains both robust and wide-ranging in the postwar period. Resonant of nineteenth-century French and Italian literary traditions, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's official position clusters round the powerful, if hackneyed, images of the steam train and the motorcar. A number of fellow Futurists, however, explore technology in more original and, in some cases, more persuasive fashions. From the technology of flying employed first-hand by Fedele Azari to Enrico Prampolini's mechanical applications on the European stage, from Anton Giulio Bragaglia's experimental cinema to Ivo Pannaggi's and Vinicio Paladini's technological rebirth in marxian key, the Futurists’ approach to technology is characterised throughout by a problematic counterpoint of modernity and tradition. If the Futurist officialdom ultimately relies on the latter, numerous alternative experiences testify to their vibrant strife towards the former.

Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives , and: The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership (review)

Reviewed by: Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives, and: The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership Chris McGee (bio) Sandra L. Beckett. Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2009. Rachel Falconer. The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership. New York: Routledge, 2009. Both of these two new studies on the phenomenon of so-called “crossover” fiction open with discussions of Harry Potter, something that should surprise almost no one. If there is any series that has, rightly or wrongly, been credited with seismic shifts in how children’s books get marketed and who exactly reads them it is certainly the Harry Potter books. Beckett notes how Rowling’s first novel is often thought of as “the crossover title, a kind of prototype of the genre” (1, emphasis in original). Falconer recalls first encountering it when her sister handed her a “paperback she had picked up in an airport shop on her way to India . . . a gloomy-looking book, with a black and white photo of a steam train approaching through fog on the cover” (1). From this simple book there quickly followed, she recalls, “an extraordinary period in which children’s literature exploded into the mainstream of popular and literary culture. Suddenly everyone was talking about children’s books, and not just Harry Potter, not just fantasy, but children’s fiction in all its variety and invention” (1). For Both Beckett and Falconer, the Harry Potter books represent the most recognizable example of the current crossover phenomenon: books read by both child and adult audiences; books consciously targeted to multiple demographics; authors who turn from writing adult fiction to writing children’s novels, or vice versa. As Beckett simply describes it, “Crossover fiction blurs the borderline between two traditionally separate readerships: children and adults” (3), something the Harry Potter books accomplished in seemingly unprecedented ways. If there is any single thing that connects both Beckett and Falconer’s books, however, it is that there are precedents for Harry Potter, that there is in fact a deeper history and broader perspective to this phenomenon than often gets acknowledged. Whereas Beckett attempts to place this phenomenon not only in a historical but also a global context, Falconer sets out to consider some of the more cultural and theoretical causes behind it. In that sense alone these two books complement each other especially well and are well worth recommending to anyone interested in the topic. [End Page 397] Beckett organizes her book around the broad categories that make up different types of crossover fiction and proceeds to work through as many examples as she can. There are lengthy chapters on so-called Adult-to-Child fiction (adult novels that are read by children and adolescents, including such standards as Gulliver’s Travels, A Christmas Carol, or The Time Machine), and Child-to-Adult fiction (children’s books read avidly by adults, including Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, or books with cult followings such as Winnie-the-Pooh, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books). The most significant strength of Beckett’s book, however, is her scope. Beckett devotes significant portions of her book to authors and titles from a global perspective, including authors (both well known and lesser known) from Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Canada, Japan, Brazil, Norway, Ireland, Scotland, India, South Africa, Australia, Poland, the Netherlands, and the Ukraine, to name just a few. As a resource for titles, authors, and publishers, the book seems invaluable. Beckett notes, to take but one example, the publishing imprint Las Tres Edades from the Spanish publishing house Siruela, dedicated to the idea that “age boundaries are very artificial, and that certain texts are suitable for everyone” (197), and which publishes books aimed at simultaneous audiences of children and adults. In her opening, Beckett writes that “Crossover literature is generally seen as a new trend” (1), an idea she sets out to discredit by the sheer weight of examples to the contrary. She points out that crossover fiction was a vibrant phenomenon of the nineteenth century, in particular, and in earlier centuries if we consider books such as...

Horses in Society: A Story of Animal Breeding and Marketing Culture, 1800–1920 (review)

Reviewed by: Horses in Society: A Story of Animal Breeding and Marketing Culture, 1800–1920 Max Foran Margaret E. Derry . Horses in Society: A Story of Animal Breeding and Marketing Culture, 1800–1920. University of Toronto Press. vii, 302. $60.00 This book does more than its title suggests. It traces the history of purebred horse breeding and links it with technological change and scientific developments. In so doing, Margaret Derry integrates the role of the horse into the rapidly developing European and North American societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Derry explores several themes. First she shows the evolution of the purebred horse as embracing two foundational structures. She skilfully weaves the pedigree and progeny-testing traditions to show how they coalesced to produce modern purebred breeding methods. In discussing the evolution of the light horse, the heavy draft horse, and the farmer's horse Derry conveys more than the intricacies of breeding. The American preference for driving over riding produced the long-backed Standardbred as compared to the shorter-backed Thoroughbred, dominant in Britain, where riding was more popular. The American demands for pedigree in Clydesdales changed breeding practices in Britain and led to the demise of what Derry thought was the best draft horse, the Clydesdale/Shire cross. Disagreement over what was the best horse for a farm, or for a farmer to breed, for that matter, meant that there was no preferred breed. Thus, farm horses were chosen for type rather than breed. In discussing the heavy horse, Derry makes several important observations. Their rise in popularity in the late nineteenth century was not due to increasing agricultural demands as might be imagined, [End Page 263] but to locomotion needs associated with urban and industrial activity. The widespread presence of the steam train enhanced short-haulage needs and further popularized the heavy draft horse. It was the arrival of the truck that shifted the emphasis on the heavy horse, to the farm, where it endured as the main legacy of the working horse world. The remount or military horse is a major focus for Derry. First she shows that, despite mechanization in warfare, the horse continued to play a major role. She discusses British and European breeding programs and how the Boer War and the First World War created a substantial market for horses in North America and especially the United States. She makes the very interesting point that remounts ultimately came to favour Arabian blood in war horses and that subsequent breeding practices helped lay the groundwork for a much later international pleasure-horse industry based on the Arabian. Derry's discussion on government involvement in horse breeding centres on stallion legislation, which she sees as an elitist tool that did little to reduce unsoundness in horses. One of the book's main strengths lies in the way Derry is able to relate horse breeding to international trade. Market preference primarily in the United States influenced breeding practices internationally. For example, tremendous pressure was put on French breeders to establish a stud book for Percherons. Similarly difference in opinion on the proper role of pedigrees and herd books in Canada and the United States led to tensions, embargoes, and tariff disputes between the two countries. It was the American demand for pure breeding with valid pedigrees that forced Canadian breeders to change their breeding and recording habits. Derry's focus is sometimes too narrow. For example, she pays little attention to western Canada, where a distinct horse culture developed in the ranching areas of the foothills. She makes no mention of George Lane, who built up the biggest purebred Percheron operation in the world on the Bar U Ranch at Longview southwest of Calgary. Strangely too she ignores Belgians in her heavy horse discussion. Though not as prominent as the other three breeds, Belgians were in Canada as early as 1902 and were gaining increased prominence by the end of the period under discussion. In 1917, for example, the Belgian stallion Farceur brought $47, 500, the highest price ever paid for a draft horse in North America. These omissions, however, do not detract from the book's overall merit. Derry has made a...

Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1907-1914. Prodigious Youth. Ed. by Anthony Phillips.

Diary-keeping, like letter-writing, is increasingly a lost art in the twenty-first century. But at the time Prokofiev was writing his diary, it was a normal part of Russian middle-class life; several of his contemporaries who feature in his early diary kept diaries themselves, notably Nikolay Myaskovsky (who later disposed of much of it, retaining only selected portions). Indeed, despite the obvious dangers of keeping any written record of one's personal feelings and experiences in the Soviet Union, many diaries were nevertheless kept and even later published, while letters were lovingly treasured. Prokofiev—in his 20s when the Bolshevik Revolution took place—began to keep a diary in safer times. He was particularly fortunate in having a mother who was both astutely aware of his talent and understanding of her son's precocious tendency to note things down. When he was 12, she presented him with his first diary, with the instruction to ‘write down in this everything that comes into your head’ . Prokofiev fortunately did not take this advice literally, but the diary did function as an important outlet for the relentlessly analytical side of his character. Struggling to establish easy, uncomplicated relationships with his Conservatoire peers, the young Prokofiev works through his own difficulties and personal flaws in his diary with a frankness that he concealed from most of the people around him. At times displeased with his behaviour, at others confessing that he hardly knew what motivated it, at times gleefully noting points scored off his rivals and friends alike, Prokofiev's diary charts the rise and fall of numerous friendships and romantic liaisons alongside his professional successes and discouragements. At the time of writing it, he could not have known that it would come to represent far more than his own life and thoughts. His was the last generation of Russian youth to enjoy the freedoms and comfort of middle-class city life. How it felt to be a student in the St Petersburg Conservatoire where Rimsky-Korsakov was still director; how it was possible to travel around Russia in the comfort of a first-class compartment on a steam train and take country walks just a short tram ride outside the city; how the youth of Prokofiev's time enjoyed each others’ company in salons, at balls, and in their parents’ country dachas: it is impossible to read these pages without feeling regret, not only for the way in which Soviet power dismantled so much of the simple pleasures that Prokofiev's generation was the last to enjoy, but for the passing of a way of life that is gone for ever.

Brunel commemorated with replica steam train

Brunel commemorated with replica steam train