Book Your Summer Shop Summer Reading
Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America
Over the years, cars have helped to define the experiences and self-perceptions of women in complex and sometimes unexpected ways. When women take the wheel, family structure and public space are reconfigured and re-gendered, creating a context for a literary tradition in which the car has served as a substitute for, an escape from, and an extension of the home, as well as a surrogate mother, a financial safeguard, and a means of self-expression.

Driving Women examines the intersection of American fiction—primarily but not exclusively by women—and automobile culture. Deborah Clarke argues that issues critical to twentieth-century American society—technology, mobility, domesticity, and agency—are repeatedly articulated through women's relationships with cars. Women writers took surprisingly intense interest in car culture and its import for modern life, as the car, replete with material and symbolic meaning, recast literal and literary female power in the automotive age.

Clarke draws on a wide range of literary works, both canonical and popular, to document women's fascination with cars from many perspectives: historical, psychological, economic, ethnic. Authors discussed include Wharton, Stein, Faulkner, O’Connor, Morrison, Erdrich, Mason, Kingsolver, Lopez, Kadohata, Smiley, Senna, Viramontes, Allison, and Silko. By investigating how cars can function as female space, reflect female identity, and reshape female agency, this engaging study opens up new angles from which to approach fiction by and about women and traces new directions in the intersection of literature, technology, and gender.

"1117176274"
Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America
Over the years, cars have helped to define the experiences and self-perceptions of women in complex and sometimes unexpected ways. When women take the wheel, family structure and public space are reconfigured and re-gendered, creating a context for a literary tradition in which the car has served as a substitute for, an escape from, and an extension of the home, as well as a surrogate mother, a financial safeguard, and a means of self-expression.

Driving Women examines the intersection of American fiction—primarily but not exclusively by women—and automobile culture. Deborah Clarke argues that issues critical to twentieth-century American society—technology, mobility, domesticity, and agency—are repeatedly articulated through women's relationships with cars. Women writers took surprisingly intense interest in car culture and its import for modern life, as the car, replete with material and symbolic meaning, recast literal and literary female power in the automotive age.

Clarke draws on a wide range of literary works, both canonical and popular, to document women's fascination with cars from many perspectives: historical, psychological, economic, ethnic. Authors discussed include Wharton, Stein, Faulkner, O’Connor, Morrison, Erdrich, Mason, Kingsolver, Lopez, Kadohata, Smiley, Senna, Viramontes, Allison, and Silko. By investigating how cars can function as female space, reflect female identity, and reshape female agency, this engaging study opens up new angles from which to approach fiction by and about women and traces new directions in the intersection of literature, technology, and gender.

54.0 In Stock
Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America

Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America

by Deborah Clarke
Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America
Add to Wishlist
Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America

Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America

by Deborah Clarke

Overview

Over the years, cars have helped to define the experiences and self-perceptions of women in complex and sometimes unexpected ways. When women take the wheel, family structure and public space are reconfigured and re-gendered, creating a context for a literary tradition in which the car has served as a substitute for, an escape from, and an extension of the home, as well as a surrogate mother, a financial safeguard, and a means of self-expression.

Driving Women examines the intersection of American fiction—primarily but not exclusively by women—and automobile culture. Deborah Clarke argues that issues critical to twentieth-century American society—technology, mobility, domesticity, and agency—are repeatedly articulated through women's relationships with cars. Women writers took surprisingly intense interest in car culture and its import for modern life, as the car, replete with material and symbolic meaning, recast literal and literary female power in the automotive age.

Clarke draws on a wide range of literary works, both canonical and popular, to document women's fascination with cars from many perspectives: historical, psychological, economic, ethnic. Authors discussed include Wharton, Stein, Faulkner, O’Connor, Morrison, Erdrich, Mason, Kingsolver, Lopez, Kadohata, Smiley, Senna, Viramontes, Allison, and Silko. By investigating how cars can function as female space, reflect female identity, and reshape female agency, this engaging study opens up new angles from which to approach fiction by and about women and traces new directions in the intersection of literature, technology, and gender.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780801885501
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date: 04/15/2007
Pages: 226
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.85(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Deborah Clarke is professor of English and women's studies at the Pennsylvania State University and author of Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Writing and Automobility
1. Women on Wheels: "A threat at yesterday's order of things"
2. Modernism: Racing and Gendering Automobility
3. My Mother the Car? Auto Bodies and Maternity
4. Getaway Cars: Women's Road Trips
5. Mobile Homelessness: Cars and the Restructuring of Home
6. Automotive Citizenship: Car as Origin
Epilogue: Writing behind the Wheel
Notes
Works Cited
Index

What People are Saying About This

Linda Wagner-Martin

An innovative, precise, and useful study. Blending cultural criticism with new readings of texts, Clarke covers a century of American fiction and a century of the history and social impact of the automobile and its advertisements.

— Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

From the Publisher

An innovative, precise, and useful study. Blending cultural criticism with new readings of texts, Clarke covers a century of American fiction and a century of the history and social impact of the automobile and its advertisements.
—Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of

Related Subjects

Literature
Social Sciences
Science & Technology
Engineering
Technology
Literary Criticism
Social Sciences - General & Miscellaneous
Social & Cultural Aspects of Technology
American Literature
General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism
20th Century American Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism
Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous
Social Aspects of Technology
Women Authors - American (U.S.) - Literary Criticism
General & Miscellaneous American Literature - Literary Criticism
American fiction->Women authors->History and criticism
Literature
Social Sciences
Science & Technology
Engineering
Technology
Literary Criticism
Social Sciences - General & Miscellaneous
Social & Cultural Aspects of Technology
American Literature
General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism
20th Century American Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism
Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous

Customer Reviews