Modernity Must Drive by Martin, Ann; Townsend, Christopher;

Short description:

Provides nuanced analyses of modernist engagements with car culture

Long description:

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A collection of essays delving into the textual representations and history of British and Irish car culture.


Modernity Must Drive focuses on British and Irish literature from the first half of the twentieth century, exploring modernist accounts of the motor car according to its layered cultural significance. Engaging with prose by Bowen, Joyce, Rhys, Woolf, Waugh, and others, the volume complicates a reading of the automobile as merely a metaphor for ""the new."" Instead, chapters historicize the complexities of motoring as it is situated in the overlaps between tradition and innovation. The collection comprises readings of the motor car as a lived object, where writers trace experiences of modernity through luxury marques, war-time ambulances, motoring guides, race cars, and roads. In a series of interdisciplinary essays, based in literary and cultural studies, the authors employ new materialist and decolonizing approaches, providing new insights into the social forces that affected individual uses of technology and the modernists who responded to the driving force of machines.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Are We There Yet? A Materialist Tour by Motor Car through British Interwar Literature
Chris Townsend (Independent Scholar) and Ann Martin (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)

Part One
1. The Car and the Crowd in Early Motor Racing
Arthur Rose (University of Exeter, UK)
2. Crawling Through No-Man's Land: Exhilaration, Endurance, and Exhaustion in Wartime Ambulance Accounts
Meg Albrinck (University of Wisconsin-Madison, US)
3. Cars within Carriages: Mrs. Dalloway and Queen Alexandra's Rose Day Drive
Ann Martin (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)

Part Two
4. The Car in the Hat: A Hispano-Suiza H6 as Diabolus ex machina in Michael Arlen's The Green Hat
Chris Townsend (Independent Scholar)
5. Gaining Speed but Losing Direction: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies
Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia, Canada)
6. Love and Recklessness: Speed in To the North
Allan Hepburn (McGill University, Canada)

Part Three
7. Cars and Girls: The Gendered Allure of Small Sports Cars, Risk, and Female Autonomy in Elizabeth Bowen's To the North and on the Race-Track in the 1930s
Daniela Georgieva (Royal Holloway University, UK)
8. Autogeddon or Autotopia? D. H. Lawrence, Stella Gibbons, and Clashing Conceptions of Modern (Auto)mobility
Marlene A. Briggs (University of British Columbia, Canada)
9. An Automotive Passage to India
Zena Meadowsong (Independent Scholar)

Part Four:
10. Thwarted Automobility and the Imperial Road in Jean Rhys's Writing
Janet Neigh (Pennsylvania State University, US)
11. The Motor Car as Modernist Time Machine: John Piper's Oxon and Heterochronic Time
Sarah Watson (Independent Scholar)

Index
About the Contributors