Overview
- Draws on literature, film, and photography
- Highlights a selection of iconic texts to reassess the road trip narrative
- Complicates the discussion on marginality and dislocation in the mid-to-late twentieth century
Part of the book series: Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture (SMLC)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography: 1955–1985 traces the origin of a postmodern iconography of mobile consumption equating roadside America with an authentic experience of the United States through the postwar road narrative, a narrative which, Elsa Court argues, has been shaped by and through white male émigré narratives of the American road, in both literature and visual culture. While stressing that these narratives are limited in their understanding of the processes of exclusion and unequal flux in experiences of modern automobility, the book works through four case studies in the American works of European-born authors Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Frank, Alfred Hitchcock, and Wim Wenders to unveil an early phenomenology of the postwar American highway, one that anticipates the works of late-twentieth-century spatial theorists Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Marc Augé and sketches a postmodern aesthetic of western mobility and consumptionthat has become synonymous with contemporary America.
Reviews
“The American Roadside takes the titanic leviathan of the American highway and, through careful unfurling of its ostensibly homogeneous network of routes, turnpikes, and rest stops, lays bare one of the most provocative and indeed recognizable American spaces.” (Will Carroll, Journal of American Studies, Vol. 55 (4), 2021)
“Written with brio – especially when the book veers off the highway of academic writing – The American Roadside offers new perspectives on well-known works.” (Douglas Field, TLS The Times Literary Supplement, the-tls.co.uk, January 8, 2021)
“Engaging and illuminating study. … Court opens up new inroads for looking at American literary and film history. … The achievement of this highly readable book is to send us back to these otherwise familiar artworks with refreshed, more inquisitive eyes.” (Neil Archer, Review 31, May, 2020)
—Sunny Stalter-Pace, Associate Professor of English, Auburn University, USA
“This important new book traces the emergence of the American roadside as an important cultural space in the post-war literature, fiction, and photography of notable European émigrés. Building on a broad range of debates in literary studies, mobility studies, and cultural theory, this book provides a major contribution to the study of mobility and place in the humanities”
—Peter Merriman, Professor in Human Geography, Aberystwyth University, Wales
“Elsa Court’s The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography: 1955-1985 is a welcome contribution to the study of American mobility in the postwar era from a transatlantic perspective. Its merits lie in its interdisciplinarity (it offers separate chapters on Nabokov, Frank, Hitchcock, and Wenders) and in its lucid engagement with European theorists of the late-twentieth century, which puts pressure on certain accepted notions of emptiness and non-placeless.”
—Monica Manolescu, Associate Professor of English at the University of Strasbourg, France, and author of Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities (2018)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Elsa Court teaches American Literature at Queen Mary University of London, UK. She has previously taught courses on contemporary French culture at the University of Oxford and her work has appeared in Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Financial Times, among others.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography
Book Subtitle: 1955–1985
Authors: Elsa Court
Series Title: Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36733-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-36732-9Published: 07 January 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-36735-0Published: 08 January 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-36733-6Published: 06 January 2020
Series ISSN: 2946-4838
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4846
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 193
Number of Illustrations: 11 b/w illustrations, 5 illustrations in colour
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, North American Literature, Literary Theory, Film History, Cultural History