Touring the American landscape has been hailed as “a ritual of American citizenship” (Shaffer 2001) with the car as one of the most important vehicles – if not the most important one – for this kind of exploration. It allows for the expression of individualism and freedom, and to “imbibe the spirit or essence of America and rekindle [one’s] sense of patriotism” (Shaffer 2001). With the mass-acquisition of cars from the 1920s onwards, scholarly research has focused mainly on automobile touring as an increasingly popular past-time activity often referred to as “gypsying” (Belasco 1979). However, Americans already felt a need to ‘rekindle’ their patriotism in the two decades before that; Turner’s proclaimed closing of the frontier in 1893, growing social unrest and the perceived erosion of “traditional values” left members of the American society around the turn of the 20th century feeling adrift and yearning for a nostalgic past with national purpose.
Using early automobile travel narratives between 1900-1920 by authors such as James W. Abbott, Florence M. Trinkle, and Charles B. Shanks, I will highlight how these texts make frontier nostalgia visible and in which ways automobile touring poses the motorist as a new type of “pioneer”. I will expand on Shaffer’s suggestion that the process of exploring the country via travel made tourists “better Americans” (142), by focusing on the presentation and emulation of pioneer experiences in these early automobile narratives. I suggest that early motorists referenced pioneer and immigrant history in their automobile travel writings to – literally or figuratively – follow their trails in order to (re)connect with a national frontier and exploration narrative, with a goal of engaging with their feelings of nostalgia to ultimately “settle” into their current American citizenship.
Melanie Frey is a doctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz and member of the ERC-funded research project "Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility." Using fictional and nonfictional automobile narratives between 1890-1930, she examines the formation of the road trip as a genre. Her dissertation’s aim is to find and analyze previously unexamined road literature in the context of antecedent travel writing – pioneer narratives between 1820-1860 – to highlight which methods, tropes, and strategies were employed to articulate this new form of travel in American literature.
This event is part of the Forun of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures led by Prof. Dr. Nadia Butt and Michelle Stork.
