Negotiating Railway Spaces A Study of Select World War II Fiction

Abstract

The railways have played a significant role in the temporal and spatial transformation of the world, the rhetoric of which is seen in the numerous literary and artistic works. They reconstructed the idea of travel reducing the time significantly and thereby altering the perception of distance. This led to the image of train featuring extensively in narratives creating a new genre called railway literature consisting of novels, poems, short stories etc where railways, railway stations or trains play a crucial role in the story, setting the backdrop, invariably acting as a medium that takes the story forward, at times evolving into a character. The thesis looks at the railway space in the World War II or Holocaust fiction and analyses how train space works differently in war fiction to transform itself into a liminal space which forms a microcosmic world of its own. The primary texts analysed are The Train was on Time (1949) by Heinrich Boll, The Train (1958) by Georges Simenon, Last Train to Istanbul by Ayse Kulin (2002), and The Last Train to London (2019) by Meg Waite Clayton. The characters of the novels are forced to travel, either by authorities or circumstances. My study of the railway space aims to place railway fiction during war times within the larger genre of travel literature and understand how forced travel operated differently from voluntary travel. It also tries to understand the transformation of the railway space from insignificant pitstops, or non-places to places of importance and analyse the railway space as a heterotopic space, which is an in-between space different from home or destination. I analyse the borders and looks at trains as a medium of border crossing. The thesis also looks at how anxiety and trauma operate in a closed, but moving space of the trains newline