| This dissertation studies the influence of the railway on the English novel between 1900 and 1939. It traces Henry James's use of the geography of the London Underground to impose order on the plot of The Wings of the Dove, and his use of railway metaphors to suggest characters' meta-fictional awareness of their plots in all of his "major" novels. It also lays out how Forster typifies Margaret Schlegel's traveling in Howards End with her railway itineraries, which resolve through the course of the novel into the sort of "wandering" that she admired in Leonard Bast. Virginia Woolf, too, experimented with the railway setting: she developed her famous decentralized point of view using the perspective of a stranger across a railway compartment, in "An Unwritten Novel," Jacob's Room, and The Waves. Finally, it shows how Graham Greene develops a type of defamiliarization device with railway settings, and examines how Greene's romantic plots (like Forster's) are displaced, not enabled by, journeys. Greene's 1930s thrillers of are examples of transit novels, the twentieth-century descendant of the Bildungsroman.. |
