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Literary Criticism’s Road Scholars at the American Century’s Turn
Author(s) -
Larson Lars Erik
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00659.x
Subject(s) - scholarship , narrative , criticism , representation (politics) , literary criticism , politics , identity (music) , sociology , history , rendering (computer graphics) , literature , art , aesthetics , law , political science , computer science , computer graphics (images)
Literary scholarship’s spatial turn has produced a number of studies exploring the site of the road and its automobile culture. This article surveys seven monographs published between 1996 and 2007 that analyze works of American fiction and nonfiction for their representation of highway narratives. These works (by Ronald Primeau, Roger Casey, Kris Lackey, Rowland Sherrill, Deborah Paes de Barros, Katie Mills, and Deborah Clarke) explore the genre’s rendering of mobility, identity, and politics on the 20th‐century’s roads of America. The essay compares these analyses for their critical methods and offers a sense of what work remains in the ongoing study of road narratives.