Modernity Must Drive

Name: Modernity Must Drive
Price: 190 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock
ISBN: 9781683933458

The Motor Car, Material Cultures, and British Modernisms

Ann Martin, Christopher Townsend

$190

Hardback

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English

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
08 January 2026

Literature: history & criticism; British & Irish history; Material culture; Motor cars: general interest

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Modernism & the Avant-Garde

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.

Edited by: Ann Martin, Christopher Townsend
Imprint: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 232mm, Width: 160mm, Spine: 26mm
Weight: 640g
ISBN: 9781683933458
ISBN 10: 1683933451
Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Modernism & the Avant-Garde
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 08 January 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.