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

This book engages with the longoverlooked bicycle as a crucial literary and cultural object. In a selection of turnofthecentury fiction, travel writing and nonfiction, 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 countercultural 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 humanpowered route to progress amidst increasingly mechanised visions of the future.