Mobilities, Literature, Culture

This is the first book dedicated to literary and cultural scholars’ engagement with mobilities scholarship. As such, the volume both advances new theoretical approaches to the study of culture and furthers the recent “humanities turn” in mobilities studies. The book’s scholarship is deeply informed by cultural geography’s vision of a mobilised reconceptualisation of space and place, but also by the contribution of literary scholars in articulating questions of travel, technologies of transport, (post)colonialism and migration through a close engagement with textual materials.  A comprehensive introduction maps pre-histories and emerging directions of this exciting interdisciplinary endeavor while taking up the theoretical and methodological challenges of the burgeoning subfield.  Contributions range across geographical and disciplinary boundaries to address questions of embodied subjectivities, mobility and the nation, geopolitics of migration, and mobilities futures.

1. Introduction: Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson, and Lynne Pearce.- 2. Railing against Apartheid: Staffrider, Township Trains, and Racialised Mobility in South Africa, Sarah Gibson.- 3. “Stationary Trivialities”: Contrasting Representations of the American Motel in Vladimir Nabokov and Jack Kerouac, Elsa Court.- 4. Mobilising Affective Brutality: Death Tourism and the Ecstasy of Postmemory in Contemporary American Culture, Pavlina Radia.- 5. Mobility, Attentiveness and Sympathy in E. M. Forster’s Howards End, Nour Dakkak.- 6. Narrative Senses of Perspective and Rhythm: Mobilising Subjectivity with Werther and Effi Briest, Roman Kabelik.- 7. Running (In) Your City, Kai Syng Tan.- 8. Migrant Labour, Immobility and Invisibility in Literature on the Arab Gulf States, Nadeen Dakkak.- 9. “Flotsam of Humanity”: Bodies, Borders, and Futures Deferred, Mike Lehman.- 10. Cycling and Narrative Structure: H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Maurice Leblanc’s Voici des Ailes, Una Brogan.- 11. Autonomous Vehicles: From Science Fiction to Sustainable Future, Robert Braun.- 12. Science Fiction Cinema and the Road Movie: Case Studies in the Estranged Mobile Gaze, Neil Archer.

Marian Aguiar is Associate Professor in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program, Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University, USA.  She is the author of Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (2011) and Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora (2018).

Charlotte Mathieson is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature in the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey, UK. She is the author of Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (2015).

Lynne Pearce is Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory at Lancaster University, UK. She is also Director for the Humanities at Lancaster’s Centre for Mobilities Research [CeMoRe].Her recent mobilities publications include Drivetime (2016) and Mobility, Memory and the Lifecourse (Palgrave 2019).