Engages literary texts in order to theorise the distinctive cognitive and affective experiences of driving What sorts of things do we think about when we’re driving – or being driven – in a car? Drivetime seeks to answer this question by drawing upon a rich archive of British and American texts from ‘the motoring century’ (1900-2000), paying particular attention to the way in which the practice of driving shapes and structures our thinking. While recent sociological and psychological research has helped explain how drivers are able to think about ‘other things’ while performing such a complex task, little attention has, as yet, been paid to the form these cognitive and affective  journeys take.  Pearce uses her close readings of  literary texts – ranging from  early twentieth-century motoring periodicals, Modernist and  inter-war fiction , American ‘road-trip’ classics , and autobiography – in order to model different types of ‘driving-event’ and, by extension, the car’s use as a means of  phenomenological encounter, escape from memory, meditation, problem-solving and daydreaming. Key Features Brings Humanities-based perspectives to bear upon topical debates in automobilities research Introduces a new concept for understanding our journeys made my car by focusing on the driver’s automotive consciousness rather than utility/function Makes use of auto-ethnography to explore and theorise automotive consciousnessDraws upon a rich archive of literary texts from across the twentieth-century including original research into unknown writers featured in the early twentieth-century texts/motoring periodicals

This landmark book traces the emergence of automotive consciousness, combining auto-ethnographic reflection, literary analysis and cultural theory to examine the unfolding of the ‘driving-event’ in the 20th century. Drawing upon literary theory, cultural studies, human geography, psychology and sociology, it is an important addition to the inter-disciplinary field of mobility studies. -- Peter Merriman, Aberystwyth University

Lynne Pearce is Professor of Literary Theory and Women’s Writing at the University of Lancaster. She has published widely in the field of literary and cultural theory, with particular interests in: feminist reader-theory (Woman/Image/Text (1991), Reading Dialogics (1994), Feminism and the Politics of Reading (1997), The Rhetorics of Feminism (1997); romance theory (Romance Writing, 2007); and mobilities research (Devolving Identities (ed.) (2000), Postcolonial Manchester (co-authored: 2013) Drivetime (2016). She is also Director of Humanities at the Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster.