To Capture What We Cannot Keep
- Submitting institution
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University of Strathclyde
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 45651963
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
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- Publisher
- Flatiron Books
- ISBN
- 9781250138774
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This novel asks what it was like to live in Scotland and France as a widowed middle class woman of restricted financial means at the close of the 19th century. What were the social expectations and career opportunities open to such women? How did their social class view them and how did they view their own predicament? Uniquely, the novel also asks and demonstrates how the great engineering projects of the age: the building of the Tour Eiffel, the Panama Canal, the Forth Road Bridge might be related metaphorically to these questions and -implicitly- to suggest how their construction impacted not simply on the built environment and on modes of communication but on the social and emotional fabric of the societies that constructed them.
The novel deploys a considerable amount of library and archive-based research into the period of the ‘belle époque’ to answer these questions. This involved thorough examination of Eiffel records at the Archives de Paris as well as a wide range of secondary material relating to the Exposition Universelle of 1889. Newspapers and illustrated magazines of the period were also a source that enabled the process of ‘world-building’ necessary to any credible historical novel.
The original character of this novel as research lies in the ways it seeks to suggest -unobtrusively- how the building of these famous monuments and means of communication does not simply reflect the ideas and ambitions of their historical moment but actually helps to construct and embody them. In the novel, it is implied through the deployment of various patterns of imagery that the building of the Eiffel Tower is simultaneously the construction of the two main protagonists’ emotional relationship. The novel thus seeks to advance our understanding of the unexpected relationships between the worlds of engineering and human emotions.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -