Scholarship of the last few years seems at times content to merely echo Schivelbusch's claims about the dialectic tensions between emancipatory progress and anxiety-inducing catastrophe in modern transport networks. Schivelbusch's materialist context frequently serves as a limitation to the breadth and scope of recent work on Victorian transport. Given the critical preoccupation with transport networks in current work in the social sciences, we might ask the question: where can scholarship on Victorian transport go after Schivelbusch? While Victorian studies scholars since Schivelbusch tend to situate transportation within less totalizing microcosms of thought, it seems that all research on Victorian transport must now begin with Schivelbusch's dialectic of simultaneous democratic expansion and cultural anxiety. As a symbol of modernity, the railway network in Britain resulted in both democratization of mobility and newly-discovered fears about the monstrous speeds and perils of modern industrialization. For Schivelbusch, the railway network introduced profound transformations not only in the movement of bodies across space but also in the phenomenological experiences of modern life. Yet, current work on Victorian transport is still trying to catch up to the profound critical interventions introduced by Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century(1977), which situates the study of nineteenth-century railway transportation within a cultural materialist paradigm.
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The expansion of digital archives and databases today has resulted in an unprecedented amount of primary documents, many still to be excavated. In the last decade or so, a plethora of studies have taken up topics related to Victorian mobility, transportation, travel, tourism, and forms and experiences of temporality and spatiality.