This chapter focuses on imaginative engagements with the steam engine in nineteenth-century literature. Following James Watt’s patent in 1781, the steam engine became an obsessive focus of literary writing, with reactions ranging from Thomas Carlyle’s denunciation of the steam-powered mechanization of the mind to Walt Whitman’s rhapsodic vision in “To a Locomotive in Winter” of the steam railway engine as “The type of the modern – emblem of motion and power – pulse of the continent.” In the nineteenth century, the steam engine became a symbolic magnet for working through new conceptions of logic and rationality, mobility and freedom, distance and proximity, city and country, and the natural and the manmade. Kirkby shows how Victorian authors picked up the new rhythms of the steam age, also providing their readers with “psychosomatic inoculation to the impact of railway travel on the nervous system.”

This chapter uses as a case study of the French National Railways (SNCF) and its multiple identities in German occupied France during World War II. During the war and the eight decades that followed, the SNCF has been storied multiple ways. The company perceived itself as a victim during the occupation, but for the first fifty years after the war was storied as a national hero because of the role some railway workers played in the resistance. Then, in the 1990s, the company found itself storied as a perpetrator for its role in transporting over 75,000 deportees crammed in merchandise cars towards concentration camps. Which identity is true? All of these positions can be argued without contorting history. Rather than trying to find the true story, this study considers these identity transformations as reflective of societal power shifts. Until we make the narrative framework behind the role ascription visible, we remain bound to cycles of intolerance and violence. The efforts of peacebuilding then involve increasing our comfort with overlapping roles.

We look at the immediate consequences of the two axioms, and discover, qualitatively and then quantitatively, the phenomena of length contraction and time dilation.