The destruction of Titanic by a spur of ice shattered popular faith in the supremacy of technology and privilege.  Belief in the inexorable progress of society through the appliance of science was shaken to the core.  In retrospect, the sinking of Titanic and the world that she represented symbolised the end of the 19th century and, together with the outbreak of war in 1914, the cold beginning of the 20th century.
  For more than 90 years Titanic, and all that her loss implies, has maintained a powerful hold on the imagination of people virtually across the world.  Potent images of the stricken liner have endured through the decades, while the multiplicity of metaphors resulting from the catastrophe have been equally powerful.
  Cultural processes of absorption, transformation and diffusion began immediately after the sinking and as resonances of Titanic’s disaster, they perhaps have significance for humanity greater than the event itself.
  Titanic and the mythic proportions of her wreck have become the subject, generator and carrier of all kinds of messages and meanings, from the sublime to the tacky.  they embrace the cultural spectrum, from high culture to low culture and from popular culture to consumer culture.  In short, Titanic goes from art to kitsch.  The Titanic litany includes literature, painting, poetry, music, opera, dance, drama, film songs, verse, religion, cartoons, jokes, fantasy, graffiti, advertising, satire, politics, pornography, propaganda, romantic fiction, science fiction, merchandising and of course exhibitions.  Titanic, or rather titanicism is an international cultural phenomenon which shows no sign of abating.  Despite the magnitude of other horrors over the past century, Titanic has become the dominant symbol of disaster in our collective imagination.  Titanic, both real and imagined, is a key icon of popular culture and one of the great metaphors of our time.