The Alternative Modernity of the Bicycle in British and French Literature, 1880-1920 - Paperback

by Una Brogan (Author)

This book engages with the long-overlooked bicycle as a crucial literary and cultural object. In a selection of turn-of-the-century fiction, travel writing and non-fiction, cycling is revealed to be a favoured literary device, allowing writers to structure their narratives in new ways or depict a fresh sensory and aesthetic experience. Moreover, this study reveals that from its earliest days, the bicycle played a compelling counter-cultural role, proposing an alternative modernity that directly challenged bourgeois, patriarchal, capitalist society. From blurring gender and class divisions, to offering a more empowering interaction with the machine and allowing an embodied and social experience of space, the bicycle pointed a human-powered route to progress amidst increasingly mechanised visions of the future.

Author Biography

Una Brogan is an independent researcher and translator. Her PhD was completed at Université Paris 7-Diderot and she subsequently taught at Université Lyon 3-Jean Moulin. Originally from Northern Ireland, she took degrees in French, history, literary translation and comparative literature at Oxford, Warwick and Paris IV-Sorbonne universities. She has also worked as a bicycle courier, for a migrants' rights NGO and is involved in environmental activism. She has contributed chapters on bicycles in literature to edited collections and journals, including Mobilities, Literature, Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Texts on Two Wheels: Bicycles in Literature and on Screen(University of Nebraska Press, 2016).