Culture on Two Wheels -

Culture on Two Wheels

The Bicycle in Literature and Film
Buch | Hardcover
366 Seiten
2016
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
978-0-8032-6972-9 (ISBN)
56,10 inkl. MwSt
Analyses the shifting cultural significance of the bicycle by examining its appearances in literary, musical, and cinematic works. Bringing together essays by a variety of cyclists and scholars with myriad angles of approach, this collection highlights the bicycle’s flexibility as a signifier and analyses the appearance of bicycles in canonical and well-known texts.
Bicycles have more cultural identities than many realize, functioning not only as literal vehicles in a text but also as “vehicles” for that text’s themes, ideas, and critiques. In the late nineteenth century the bicycle was seen as a way for the wealthy urban elite to reconnect with nature and for women to gain a measure of personal freedom, while during World War II it became a utilitarian tool of the French Resistance and in 1970s China stood for wealth and modernization. Lately it has functioned variously as the favored ideological steed of environmentalists, a means of community bonding and aesthetic self-expression in hip hop, and the ride of choice for bike messenger–idolizing urban hipsters. Culture on Two Wheels analyzes the shifting cultural significance of the bicycle by examining its appearances in literary, musical, and cinematic works spanning three continents and more than 125 years of history.


Bringing together essays by a variety of cyclists and scholars with myriad angles of approach, this collection highlights the bicycle’s flexibility as a signifier and analyzes the appearance of bicycles in canonical and well-known texts such as Samuel Beckett’s modernist novel Molloy, the Oscar-winning film Breaking Away, and various Stephen King novels and stories, as well as in lesser-known but equally significant texts, such as the celebrated Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Sacrifice and Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s nineteenth-century travelogue A Canterbury Pilgrimage, the latter of which traces the route of Chaucer’s pilgrims via bicycle.

 Listen to an interview with the author.

Jeremy Withers is an assistant professor of English at Iowa State University. Daniel P. Shea is an associate professor of English at Austin Peay State University. Zack Furness is an assistant professor of communications at Pennsylvania State University, Greater Allegheny, and the author of One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility.

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Zack Furness

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Bicycle as Rolling Signifier

Jeremy Withers and Daniel P. Shea

Part 1. Bikes in Literature

1. Pilgrims on Wheels: The Pennells, F. W. Bockett, and Literary Cycle Travels

Dave Buchanan

2. From Charles Pratt to Mark Twain to Frank Norris: Horse versus Bicycle, Man versus Machine

Peter Kratzke

3. "The Face of the Bicyclist": Women’s Cycling and the Altered Body in The Type-Writer Girl

Alyssa Straight

4. Bicycles and Warfare: The Effects of Excessive Mobility in H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air

Jeremy Withers

5. Like a Furnace: Alfred Jarry’s The Supermale, Doping, and the Limits of Positivism

Corry Cropper

6. Albertine the Cyclist: A Queer Feminist Bicycle Ride through Proust’sIn Search of Lost Time

Una Brogan

7. The Existential Cyclist: Bicycles and Personal Responsibility in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others

Nanci J. Adler

8. Communing with Machines: The Bicycle as a Figure of Symbolic Transgression in the Posthumanist Novels of Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien

Amanda Duncan

9. "Hi-Yo, Silver": The Bicycle in the Fiction of Stephen King

Don Tresca

Part 2. Bikes in Film

10. "I’ll Get You, My Pretty!": Bicycle Horror and the Abject Cyclicity of History

Matthew Pangborn

11. Bicycles in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim: Images of Emancipation and Repression

Charles L. P. Silet

12. We Hope, and We Lose Hope: The Postman’s Bicycle in Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice

Benjamin van Loon

13. Bicycle Borrowers after Neorealism: Global Nou-velo Cinema

Anne Ciecko

14. Breaking Away and Vital Materialism: Embodying Dreams of Social Mobility via the Bicycle Assemblage

Ryan Hediger

15. Beijing Bicycle: Desire, Identity, and the Wheels

Jinhua Li

16. "Swerve! I’m on My Bike": Mediated Images of Bicycling in Youth-Produced Hip-Hop

Melody Lynn Hoffmann

Afterword: Form and History in the Bicycle Sculptures of Ai Weiwei

Daniel P. Shea

Contributors

Index

Erscheinungsdatum
Vorwort Zack Furness
Zusatzinfo 6 photographs, 4 illustrations
Verlagsort Lincoln
Sprache englisch
Maße 152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt Kunst / Musik / Theater Film / TV
Sachbuch/Ratgeber Sport Motor- / Rad- / Flugsport
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10 0-8032-6972-2 / 0803269722
ISBN-13 978-0-8032-6972-9 / 9780803269729
Zustand Neuware
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