The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism

摘要

In The Speed Handbook, Enda Duffy offers a history of the cultural meaning of speed during the formative years of the automobile revolution. Her argument is threefold: first, that "speed is the single new pleasure invented by modernity" (p. 3); second, that the emergence of the automobile as a mass phenomenon after 1900 placed this new pleasure at the disposal- more accurately, under the control-of individuals for the first time; and third, that a cultural history of the pleasure of individual automotive speed is best approached through an analysis of the high- and lowbrow art and literature of the period.