Speed, Desire, and Collision: Automotive Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century American Literature

Journal of Travel Literature Studies

JTLS, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2026, pp. 77-98.

Print ISSN: 3135-6788; Online ISSN: 3135-6796

Journal homepage: https://www.tlsjournal.com

DOI：https://doi.org/10.64058/jtls260102sdcam

Speed, Desire, and Collision: Automotive Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century American Literature

Junping Zhang

Abstract: This article examines the automobile as a crucial medium of modern experience in early twentieth-century American literature. Focusing on Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it argues that the automobile functions not merely as a symbol of technological progress or material wealth but as a cultural apparatus through which modern subjectivity is produced and contested. Tracing a three-part trajectory from speed to desire to collision, this article shows how, in Wharton, automotive speed transforms sensory perception while revealing the privilege that structures access to accelerated mobility; in Dreiser, the automobile becomes a form of “mobile visibility,” converting economic status into public spectacle and intensifying fantasies of social advancement; and in Fitzgerald, the automobile’s promises of autonomy and pleasure culminate in collision, exposing the unequal distribution of vulnerability and responsibility within modern consumer culture. By bringing these texts into a common analytical framework, the article develops the concept of automotive modernity to describe the conjunction of technological movement, consumer desire, social aspiration, and bodily risk. It ultimately argues that collision is not external to automotive freedom but its immanent limit: the very technologies that appear to maximize individual mobility also reveal the inequalities and violence upon which that mobility depends.

Keywords: automobile; automotive modernity; speed; consumer desire; collision

Author Biography: Junping Zhang, PhD in Literature, is a Professor and Master’s Supervisor at the School of Foreign Studies, Jiangnan University. Her main research fields include literary theories, comparative literature, and world literature. Email: jndxzjp@163.com.