Collisions: identity and the railway in nineteenth-century literature

This thesis examines the effects of the technology of mobility, specifically the railway, on personal identity and the human body in British literature of the nineteenth century. Examining three popular works from the nineteenth century, Wilkie Collinss The Woman in White, Ellen Woods East Lynne, and Oscar Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest, I trace the development of anxieties over the relationship between man and machine, from the omnipresent nervous panic present in Collinss work to the nonchalant archness present in Wildes. I suggest that these works are used to negotiate and control the complex and often disturbing matrix of bodies, identities, and the railway present in Victorian British consciousness.