The freedom to go anywhere and become anyone has profoundly shaped our
national psyche. Transforming our sense of place and identity--whether in terms of
social and economic status, or race and ethnicity, or gender and sexuality--American
mobility is perhaps nowhere more vividly captured than in the image of the open road. From
pioneer trails to the latest car commercial, the road looms large as a form of expansiveness and
opportunity.Too often it is the celebratory idea of the road as a
free-floating zone moving the traveler beyond the typical concerns of space and time that
dominates the discussion. Rather than thinking of mobility as an escape from cultural tensions,
however, Ann Brigham proposes that we understand mobility as a mode of engagement with them. She
explores the genre of road narratives to show how mobility both thrives on and attempts to
manage shifting conflicts about space and society in the United States.From
the earliest transcontinental automobile narratives from the 1910s, through classics like Jack
Kerouac's On the Road and the film Thelma & Louise, up
to post-9/11 narratives, Brigham traces the ways in which mobility has been imagined,
created, and interrogated over the past century and shows how mobility promises, and threatens,
to incorporate the outsider and to blur boundaries. Bringing together textual and cultural
analysis, theories of spatiality, and sociohistorical frameworks, this book offers an
invigoratingly different view of mobility and a new understanding of the road narrative's
importance in American culture. Cultural Frames, Framing
Culture