• Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Narrating a New Mobility Landscape in the Modern American Road Story, 1893-1921: Ambivalence and Aspiration

Narrating a New Mobility Landscape in the Modern American Road Story, 1893-1921: Ambivalence and Aspiration

Paperback

Series: Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture

Literary Criticism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 3031511816
ISBN13: 9783031511813
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: May 10 2025
Pages: 294
Language: English

This book examines travel narratives as a medium used by the American public to imagine and negotiate new ways to live in, move through, and share national space. Setting an array of archival material, including congressional deliberations, into analytical conversation with road stories by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Upton Sinclair, Emily Post, Zitkala-Sa, Henry Ford and many others, this book reframes our understanding of the origins of American automobility. The evidence gathered here sheds light on the processes by which the defining social infrastructure of the twentieth century came to be enacted, and also exposes the fraught debates and abiding misgivings that continue to roil infrastructure planning today. The insights captured in this study purposefully deepen our attention to questions of land use and collective responsibility at a moment when the ecological and social-justice consequences of American automobility must be thoroughly re-evaluated so that more conscientious mobility futures may be developed.

Also in

Literary Criticism