Modernity Must Drive: The Motor Car, Material Cultures, and British Modernisms
Ann Martin · Christopher Townsend
Dec 2025 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Ebook
353
Pages
infoThis book will become available on December 11, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
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.
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.
About the author
Ann Martin is associate professor in the Department of English at University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Chris Townsend is independent scholar, freelance writer on the arts, and curator.
Chris Townsend is independent scholar, freelance writer on the arts, and curator.
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