Abstract
There are two Titanics; this book is about the second of them. The first is the physical Titanic, the rusting remains of which can still be found at 49° 56′ west, 41° 43′ north, at a depth of 12,000 feet below the north Atlantic Ocean. The second Titanic is the mythical Titanic: the Titanic that emerged just as its tangible predecessor slipped from human view on 15 April 1912. It is this second Titanic which is the much more important, and infinitely more interesting, of the two.
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Notes
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man for Himself (London, 1996).
Tim Radford, ‘Titanic Iceberg Is Innocent’ in The Guardian, 17 September 1993, p. 1. This is just one example of continuing media interest in the Titanic.
Recent exceptions are Heyer’s account of media coverage of the Titanic and Stephen Biel’s study of the disaster in North American culture. See Paul Heyer, Titanic Legacy (Westport, Connecticut, 1995)
Steven Biel, Down With the Old Canoe (New York, 1996).
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984).
Roger Chartier, Cultural History (Cambridge, 1988).
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975; first paperback edition, 1977).
Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer, Polar Research Series (London and New York, 1993), p. 3.
Some authorities such as Jonathon Rose, take the Edwardian period as extending as far as 1919. See Jonathon Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, 1895–1919 (Athens, Ohio, 1986).
T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1948), p. 41.
Colin MacCabe, ‘Defining Popular Culture’ in High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film, edited by Colin MacCabe, Images of Culture (Manchester, 1986), p. 8.
Eugene Weber, France: Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1986), p. 4.
James Monaco, How to Read a Film (New York and Oxford, 1981), p. 211.
Robert Warshow The Immediate Experience (New York, 1962), p. 28.
John Brinkerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, 1984) pp. ix - xii.
See especially T.W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry as Mass Deception’ in The Dialectic of Enlightenment translated by John Cumming (London, 1979).
T.W. Adorno, Notes on Literature, Volume II (New York, 1992), p. 245.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, translated by Peter Winch (second edition, Oxford, 1980), p. 80.
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, NJ, 1947, fifth printing, 1974), p. 5.
John Dunn, ‘Practising History and Social Science on ‘Realist’ Assumptions’ in Political Obligation in its Historical Context (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 81–111, 110–11.
Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’ in The Interpretation of Cultures (London, 1975), p. 452.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London, 1977).
John Kenneth Galbraith, A Tenured Professor: A Novel (London, 1990), p. 50.
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© 1999 Richard Howells
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Howells, R. (1999). Introduction. In: The Myth of the Titanic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510845_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510845_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40585-5
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