Modernity Must Drive
The Motor Car, Material Cultures, and British Modernisms
Published on 11. December 2025
Book
Hardback
352 pages
978-1-68393-345-8 (ISBN)
Description
A collection of essays delving into the textual representations and history of British and Irish car culture.
Modernity Must Drive focuses on British and Irish literature from the first half of the twentieth century, exploring modernist accounts of the motor car according to its layered cultural significance. Engaging with prose by Bowen, Joyce, Rhys, Woolf, Waugh, and others, the volume complicates a reading of the automobile as merely a metaphor for "the new." Instead, chapters historicize the complexities of motoring as it is situated in the overlaps between tradition and innovation. The collection comprises readings of the motor car as a lived object, where writers trace experiences of modernity through luxury marques, war-time ambulances, motoring guides, race cars, and roads. In a series of interdisciplinary essays, based in literary and cultural studies, the authors employ new materialist and decolonizing approaches, providing new insights into the social forces that affected individual uses of technology and the modernists who responded to the driving force of machines.
Modernity Must Drive focuses on British and Irish literature from the first half of the twentieth century, exploring modernist accounts of the motor car according to its layered cultural significance. Engaging with prose by Bowen, Joyce, Rhys, Woolf, Waugh, and others, the volume complicates a reading of the automobile as merely a metaphor for "the new." Instead, chapters historicize the complexities of motoring as it is situated in the overlaps between tradition and innovation. The collection comprises readings of the motor car as a lived object, where writers trace experiences of modernity through luxury marques, war-time ambulances, motoring guides, race cars, and roads. In a series of interdisciplinary essays, based in literary and cultural studies, the authors employ new materialist and decolonizing approaches, providing new insights into the social forces that affected individual uses of technology and the modernists who responded to the driving force of machines.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cranbury
United States
Publishing group
Associated University Presses
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
658 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-68393-345-8 (9781683933458)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Ann Martin | Christopher Townsend
Modernity Must Drive
The Motor Car, Material Cultures, and British Modernisms
E-Book
12/2025
1st Edition
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,U.S.
€107.99
Available for download
Ann Martin | Christopher Townsend
Modernity Must Drive
The Motor Car, Material Cultures, and British Modernisms
E-Book
12/2025
1st Edition
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,U.S.
€107.99
Available for download
Persons
Ann Martin is associate professor in the Department of English at University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Chris Townsend is independent scholar, freelance writer on the arts, and curator.
Chris Townsend is independent scholar, freelance writer on the arts, and curator.
Content
Introduction: Are We There Yet? A Materialist Tour by Motor Car through British Interwar Literature
Chris Townsend (Independent Scholar) and Ann Martin (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Part One
1. The Car and the Crowd in Early Motor Racing
Arthur Rose (University of Exeter, UK)
2. Crawling Through No-Man's Land: Exhilaration, Endurance, and Exhaustion in Wartime Ambulance Accounts
Meg Albrinck (University of Wisconsin-Madison, US)
3. Cars within Carriages: Mrs. Dalloway and Queen Alexandra's Rose Day Drive
Ann Martin (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Part Two
4. The Car in the Hat: A Hispano-Suiza H6 as Diabolus ex machina in Michael Arlen's The Green Hat
Chris Townsend (Independent Scholar)
5. Gaining Speed but Losing Direction: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies
Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia, Canada)
6. Love and Recklessness: Speed in To the North
Allan Hepburn (McGill University, Canada)
Part Three
7. Cars and Girls: The Gendered Allure of Small Sports Cars, Risk, and Female Autonomy in Elizabeth Bowen's To the North and on the Race-Track in the 1930s
Daniela Georgieva (Royal Holloway University, UK)
8. Autogeddon or Autotopia? D. H. Lawrence, Stella Gibbons, and Clashing Conceptions of Modern (Auto)mobility
Marlene A. Briggs (University of British Columbia, Canada)
9. An Automotive Passage to India
Zena Meadowsong (Independent Scholar)
Part Four:
10. Thwarted Automobility and the Imperial Road in Jean Rhys's Writing
Janet Neigh (Pennsylvania State University, US)
11. The Motor Car as Modernist Time Machine: John Piper's Oxon and Heterochronic Time
Sarah Watson (Independent Scholar)
Index
About the Contributors
Chris Townsend (Independent Scholar) and Ann Martin (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Part One
1. The Car and the Crowd in Early Motor Racing
Arthur Rose (University of Exeter, UK)
2. Crawling Through No-Man's Land: Exhilaration, Endurance, and Exhaustion in Wartime Ambulance Accounts
Meg Albrinck (University of Wisconsin-Madison, US)
3. Cars within Carriages: Mrs. Dalloway and Queen Alexandra's Rose Day Drive
Ann Martin (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Part Two
4. The Car in the Hat: A Hispano-Suiza H6 as Diabolus ex machina in Michael Arlen's The Green Hat
Chris Townsend (Independent Scholar)
5. Gaining Speed but Losing Direction: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies
Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia, Canada)
6. Love and Recklessness: Speed in To the North
Allan Hepburn (McGill University, Canada)
Part Three
7. Cars and Girls: The Gendered Allure of Small Sports Cars, Risk, and Female Autonomy in Elizabeth Bowen's To the North and on the Race-Track in the 1930s
Daniela Georgieva (Royal Holloway University, UK)
8. Autogeddon or Autotopia? D. H. Lawrence, Stella Gibbons, and Clashing Conceptions of Modern (Auto)mobility
Marlene A. Briggs (University of British Columbia, Canada)
9. An Automotive Passage to India
Zena Meadowsong (Independent Scholar)
Part Four:
10. Thwarted Automobility and the Imperial Road in Jean Rhys's Writing
Janet Neigh (Pennsylvania State University, US)
11. The Motor Car as Modernist Time Machine: John Piper's Oxon and Heterochronic Time
Sarah Watson (Independent Scholar)
Index
About the Contributors