Driving Women

Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America
Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8018-8550-1
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 226 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 431 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Clarke, Deborah

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Technische Wissenschaften Technik Allgemein Technikgeschichte
• Technische Wissenschaften Verkehrstechnik | Transportgewerbe Fahrzeugtechnik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

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