Engine of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Masha Belenky, associate professor of French, examines the connection between public transportation and popular culture in 19th-century Paris through a focus on the omnibus—a horse-drawn vehicle of urban transport. At the intersection of literary criticism and cultural history, the book argues that the omnibus was a metaphor through which writers and artists explored evolving social dynamics of class and gender, meditated on the meaning of progress and change and reflected on one’s own literary and artistic practices.