List of Figures
Preface
Introduction
- Explaining the car: Prolegomena for a history of North-Atlantic automobilism
- Introduction: writing a synthesis
- Do narratives explain?
- Constructing a master narrative
- Developing an explanatory toolbox
- Conclusions
PART I: EMERGENCE (1895 - 1918)
Chapter 1. Racing, touring, tinkering: constructing the adventure machine (1895 – 1914/1917)
- Introduction
- First phase: emergence and roots of the petrol car (until 1902)
- Second phase: resistance against elite touring in heavy family cars (1902 – 1908)
- A first analysis of automotive adventure: the masculine ‘conquest of nature’
- Third phase: the “small capitalist” and the “average man” (1908 until the war)
- Conclusions
Chapter 2. How it feels to be run over: the grammar of early automobile adventure
- Introduction
- Driving and writing: Analyzing ‘affinities’ of touristic and artistic experiences
- ‘Auto-poetics’: mainstream authors
- Literary resistance against the car: Critical voices from the UK
- Colonialism by car: Gendered travel writing
- Male violence and aggression: A French-Belgian group of writer-motorists
- Sub-literary novels: the Williamsons and youth novels
- Flight Forward: The avant-garde, silent movies, and the celebration of automotive violence
- Tarkington, Cather and Dreiser: auto-poetics before America’s entry into the war
- Enhanced Adventures: Analysis and conclusions
Chapter 3. Driving on aggression: The First World War and the systems approach to the car
- Introduction
- Preparing for war (1): clubs, the military, and aggression
- Preparing for war (2): organizing mobility
- Mobilization, immobility, remobilization: aggression, violence and atrocities
- War trophies 1 to 3: the truck, logistics and maintenance
- War trophy 4: thanatourism and other adventures
- Ending the war, ending the chapter: conclusions
PART II: PERSISTENCE (1918 - 1940)
Chapter 4. “Why apologize for pleasure?” Consuming the Car in Boom and Bust
- Introduction
- The car as commodity; its spread among the Atlantic middle class
- European car consumption and ‘Americanization’: eagerness compared
- The car as ‘necessity’: A profile of car use in the Interbellum
- Migration, mass tourism and the family car
- Conclusions
Chapter 5. Translation and Transition: Re-adjusting the Technology and Culture of Middle Class Family Adventures
- Introduction
- Orchestrating Car Technology: Constructing the Closed Automobile
- The process of Prosthetization: Mutually Adjusting Skills and Technology
- Multiple Adventures: Thrills, Skills, and Risks
- Conclusions
Chapter 6. Conquest and Domination: Domesticated Violence and the Coldness of Distance
- Introduction
- An avant-garde in autopoetic travel experience: the conquest of the ‘periphery’
- Domesticating adventure: the family as collective subject
- Flows and violence: urban culture and the middleclass family
- With or without a car: a women’s adventure?
- The ubiquitous car: a spectrum of adventures, adjusted to middleclass taste
- The cult of cool: becoming cyborg
- Symbolisms and affinities: avant-garde and popular culture
- Conclusions
Chapter 7. Swarms into flow: The Contested Emergence of the Automobile System
- Introduction
- Coping with the car’s unreliability: maintenance, repair, and the functional adventure
- Transnationalizing the local: planning and building national road networks
- Contested order: spatial planners versus engineers
- Rescuing automotive adventure: the construction of road safety
- The battle of the systems: road versus rail and the ‘coordination crisis’
- Conclusions
Transcendence and the automotive production of mobility: Conclusions on half a century of North-Atlantic automobilism
- Introduction
- Crossing borders: Half a century of North-Atlantic automobilism
- Crossing boundaries: Adventure, fiction and the explanation of the car's persistence
- Some closing remarks on methodology and future research
