Abstract
Perspectives on Mobility is published in a series on Spatial Practices that situates itself as part of ‘the topographical turn in cultural studies’, publishing new works on ‘spaces and places’ and building bridges ‘between the disciplines of cultural history, literary and cultural studies, and geography’. In that regard this collection is an apt contribution, opening up promising and sometimes surprising avenues for dialogue between cultural geographies of mobility and literary studies of mobility. It includes literary and cultural studies scholars, as well as one cultural geographer.
Following a brief introduction on literature, culture and mobility by the editors, Part One focuses on Movement and the Making of Space, while Part Two focuses on what are called Conceptual Spaces. The first chapter by Christian Huck is exemplary, bringing together an investigation of the mobility of dime store novels with the actual mobility of currency in the form of the dime, and the mobility of a stock character, the detective (in this case focusing on Nick Carter). It makes fascinating connections between novels and stagecoach travel, dime novels and rail travel, and the mutability and mobility of the figure of the dime novel detective. The opening chapter of Part Two by Birgit Neumann on global mobility in early modern English literature is also one of the strongest, with complex and suggestive readings of key texts concerning sea-borne movement and stasis, although it left one longing for further development of this theme in readings of colonial and postcolonial literature.
The other chapters are more of a mixed bag. Two relate to mapping and cartography, although neither is really about mobility. Two offer close comparative analysis of two texts. Klaus Benesch’s juxtaposition of Henry Thoreau’s sauntering and Frederick Douglass’s narrative of escaping slavery would work better with a deeper analysis of racial, class, and gender formations in the 19th-century United States, and their relation to potential mobility; whereas Anna Beck’s reading of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Ian McEwan’s Saturday succeeds more in identifying the relation between subjectivity, space, mobility and movement in these two novels and how freedoms to move vary by gender, class, ethnicity or sexuality.
Another more promising pair of chapters builds on emergent and processual philosophies of movement. Philipp Erchinger’s study of the naturalist G.H. Lewes draws fascinating connections between mobile discourse, mobile subjects and the loose moorings of the seaside and its emergent life forms; while Peter Merriman’s essay on ‘movement-space’ in various process philosophies and post-phenomenological cultural geography suggests provocative ideas of ‘movement, rhythm, force, energy, or affect as primitives or registers that might be of importance when understanding the unfolding of events’ (p. 189). The last pair of chapters addresses poetic discourses around transport technologies such as the train, airplane, and automobile, and their relation to metaphors of speed and acceleration.
Overall, it is difficult to see this as a text that will serve as a core reading in any field, but it does offer some rewards for those who might want to dip into it. A more definitive statement on theoretical approaches to mobility within literary studies, or on methodologies for the cultural study of mobilities through literature, remains to be written.