Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm
Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film
Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm
Reihe: Cultural Frames, Framing Culture
ISBN: 978-0-8139-3750-2
Verlag: University of Virginia Press
Too often it is the celebratory idea of the road as a free-floating zone moving the traveler beyond the typical concerns of space and time that dominates the discussion. Rather than thinking of mobility as an escape from cultural tensions, however, Ann Brigham proposes that we understand mobility as a mode of engagement with them. She explores the genre of road narratives to show how mobility both thrives on and attempts to manage shifting conflicts about space and society in the United States.
From the earliest transcontinental automobile narratives from the 1910s, through classics like Jack Kerouac's On the Road and the film Thelma & Louise, up to post-9/11 narratives, Brigham traces the ways in which mobility has been imagined, created, and interrogated over the past century and shows how mobility promises, and threatens, to incorporate the outsider and to blur boundaries. Bringing together textual and cultural analysis, theories of spatiality, and sociohistorical frameworks, this book offers an invigoratingly different view of mobility and a new understanding of the road narrative’s importance in American culture.