Description
Book SynopsisNineteenth-Century Americans saw danger lurking everywhere: in railway cars and trolleys, fireplaces and floods, and amid social and political movements, from the abolition of slavery to suffrage. After the Civil War, Americans were shaken by financial panic and a volatile post-slave economy. They were awe-struck and progressively alarmed by technological innovations that promised speed and commercial growth, but also posed unprecedented physical hazard. Most of all, Americans were uncertain, particularly in light of environmental disasters like hurricanes and wildfires, about their own city on a hill and the once indisputable and protective hand of a beneficent God. The disasters, accidents, and social and political upheavals that characterized nineteenth-century culture had enormous explanatory power, metaphoric and real. Today we speak of similar insecurities: financial, informational, environmental, and political, and we obsessively express our worry and fear for the future. Cultur
Trade ReviewJennifer Travis’s deeply-researched study examines how nineteenth-century Americans sought to guard against the very technology that they hoped would keep them safe. Moving from sentimental novels to medical, sociological and business texts, Travis skillfully charts Americans’ ongoing fear of vulnerability, and the lengths to which they would go to avoid it. This book has much to offer nineteenth-century scholars, but It also offers rich insight into our current struggle to negotiate technology’s risks and rewards. -- Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut
Jennifer Travis has written an important, groundbreaking book that will generate much discussion. Her command of scholarship beyond literary studies is extraordinary. -- Paul Sorrentino, Virginia Tech
Table of ContentsIntroduction - Crash and Burn Chapter One - A “damsel-errant in quest of adventures”: E.D.E.N. Southworth, Sensation, and the Law Chapter Two - Crash Lit: Trains, Pains, and Automobiles Chapter Three - “Hurts That Will Not Heal”: Theodore Dreiser, Masculinity, and Railroad Labor Chapter Four - Burning Down the House: Comets, Hurricanes, and the Fire to Come Chapter Five - The Tremblor: Disaster and Vulnerability, San Francisco, 1906
