Description

The Titanic disaster exposed the fascinations and anxieties of Edwardian Britain and America. The ship and the catastrophe revealed the preoccupation of the Age with ever larger and ever more impressive machines, with speed and size, with exploration to the farthest reaches of the earth, but also with abjection and poverty, with migration and the feverish movement of populations, with the roles of women and men, with the inequalities of social class, with the Abyss that awaited failure and error. All converged nightmarishly on the night of April 15, 1912.

In the immediate aftermath, major writers were moved to comment, explain, and mourn – Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad. But from the official inquiries and the controversies that arose from them, it emerged that the sceptre of power in the world was passing from Britain and Europe to the expanding United States of America.

“In this brilliant extensive study of the cultural vortex which surrounded, and surrounds to this day, the making of the Titanic and its terrible fate, John Wilson Foster, the Belfast-born literary critic and scholar, has produced a classic.”

    Gerald Dawe, The Irish Times