Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony by Myka Tucker-Abramson ISBN 9781503641884, 9781503642164, 9781503642157, 1503641880, 150364216X, 1503642151 instant download

Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony by Myka Tucker-Abramson ISBN 9781503641884, 9781503642164, 9781503642157, 1503641880, 150364216X, 1503642151 instant download

Myka Tucker-Abramson draws from an archive of more than 140 global road novels from over twenty countries, challenging dominant conceptions of the road novel as primarily concerned with American experiences and subjectivities. Grounding her analysis in materialist theories of genre, world-ecology and commodity frontier frameworks, and post-45 American literary studies, Tucker-Abramson persuasively argues that the road novel is a genre specific to, coterminous with, and revealing of US hegemony's global trajectory. Shifting our focus from Americanness to the fraught geopolitics of US Empire, from the car to the built environment through which it moves, and from passengers to those left behind, Tucker-Abramson remaps the road novel, elucidating the genre's unique ability both to reveal the violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization and to obfuscate these harsh truths through seductive narratives of individual success and failure.

Myka Tucker-Abramson is Associate Professor, University of Warwick and the author of Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Cultural Origins of Neoliberalism (2018).