Modernity Must Drive: The Motor Car, Material Cultures, and British Modernisms

A collection of essays delving into the textual representations and history of British and Irish car culture.


Modernity Must Drive focuses on British and Irish literature from the first half of the twentieth century, exploring modernist accounts of the motor car according to its layered cultural significance. Engaging with prose by Bowen, Joyce, Rhys, Woolf, Waugh, and others, the volume complicates a reading of the automobile as merely a metaphor for “the new.” Instead, chapters historicize the complexities of motoring as it is situated in the overlaps between tradition and innovation. The collection comprises readings of the motor car as a lived object, where writers trace experiences of modernity through luxury marques, war-time ambulances, motoring guides, race cars, and roads. In a series of interdisciplinary essays, based in literary and cultural studies, the authors employ new materialist and decolonizing approaches, providing new insights into the social forces that affected individual uses of technology and the modernists who responded to the driving force of machines.

• Publication date: 11 December 2025
• Page count: 352
• Dimensions: Height 232 mm; Width 160 mm; Thickness 26 mm
• Publisher: Associated University Presses
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781683933458