American
Literary Criticism’s Road Scholars at the American Century’s Turn
By , University of Portland (September 2009)
Sections: American
Subjects: Literature, Cultural Studies.
Periods: 1000 - 1999, 1900-1999.
Key Topics: literary criticism , travel writing.
Abstract
Literary scholarship’s spatial turn has produced a number of studies exploring the site of the road and its automobile culture. This article surveys seven monographs published between 1996 and 2007 that analyze works of American fiction and nonfiction for their representation of highway narratives. These works (by Ronald Primeau, Roger Casey, Kris Lackey, Rowland Sherrill, Deborah Paes de Barros, Katie Mills, and Deborah Clarke) explore the genre’s rendering of mobility, identity, and politics on the 20th-century’s roads of America. The essay compares these analyses for their critical methods and offers a sense of what work remains in the ongoing study of road narratives.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00659.x
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