Engine of modernity examines the connection between public transportation and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris through a focus on the omnibus - a horse-drawn urban conveyance. The book introduces the omnibus as a key vector for understanding the intersection of urban and literary modernity in France.

Masha Belenky is Associate Professor of French at the George Washington University

Introduction
Part
1. Modernity in motion: Omnibus literature and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris
2. Transitory Tales: reading the omnibus repertoire
Part II
3. Circulation and visibility: Staging class aboard the omnibus
4. Moral geographies: Women and public transport
Epilogue