Off the Road:
The Environmental Aesthetics
of Early Automobility

Introduction

The project combines two established disciplines with longstanding methodologies: literary studies and history. Within history, it also combines environmental history and the history of knowledge, two more recent subfields that have already explored joint interests and concerns.

The relationship between literature and history has been discussed for centuries. The second half of the twentieth century saw two important methodological reorientations that reapproximated academic research in these fields. One was the narrative turn in history, i.e., the recognition that historians tell stories and in doing so use formal devices they share with literary narratives. The other was the New Historicism, a movement in literary studies that regarded literature as one of the many discourses that constitute history. Both of these reorientations laid the methodological groundwork on which interdisciplinary collaborations between literary studies and history have since built, and on which our project builds as well.

Bringing together the methodologies, thematic preoccupations, and source materials of literary studies and history—especially environmental history and the history of knowledge—enables a capacious vision of the aesthetic world of early automobility. This interdisciplinary approach foregrounds the interplay between perception, representation, and knowledge, revealing how new technological conditions are embedded not only in new experiences of the environment, but also in new narrative strategies and epistemic formations. The history of technology, when viewed through literary expression, is freed from the constraints of biographical, deterministic or teleological accounts and instead reimagined as a field of sensory and conceptual experimentation. Literature, as a mode of imaginative engagement, offers access to forms of knowledge that are embodied, affective, and situational—insights often elided in empiricist historical accounts. By attending to the material cultures and everyday practices of automobility as they are rendered in literature, the project contributes to a more integrated understanding of environmental awareness as shaped by modernity’s mobile aesthetics.

Within the more specific scope of our project, this interdisciplinary collaboration has given rise to a number of methodological strengths and challenges.

Methodological Crossovers

We examine literary texts as historical sources, and, conversely, we bring literary studies approaches to bear on sources that have not traditionally fallen within its purview. In the process, we identify methods that can be applied to both literary and historical sources and we inquire to what extent these established sets of methods modify one another. We also consider hybrid sources (e.g., newspaper articles, travel writing, nonfictional travel memoirs), that blur boundaries between genres and trouble the distinction between literary and historical sources. The combination of history and literary studies perspectives can help us better understand, elucidate, and analyze these texts.

One way in which literary studies methods can deepen our understanding of history is by focusing on how words changed their meaning and why. In doing so, we become aware of semantic changes undergone by terms such as “pollution” (cf. Rome 1996) or “waste” (cf. McCarthy 2007)—not least, we hypothesize, in response to the arrival of automobility. The link between such semantic shifts in language and new formations of knowledge around automobility deserves further attention and will be elaborated upon in the section “Semantic Shifts” below. Similarly, we research potential overlaps in the terminology used by writers and scientists to describe the driving experience. In literary studies we benefit from the use of historical methods to explain what implications real-world references (e.g., to certain places, settings, and regions) had at the time in individual and collective imaginaries. While literary studies can keep track of a stylistic and rhetorical repertoire that was instrumental in aestheticizing the experience of automobility (metaphors, narrative modes, recurrent imagery, etc.), history can explain how automobility and its aesthetics changed perceptions of and knowledge about the environment.

One outcome of putting together methods from literary studies and history is that we can trace the development of the automobile as a cultural construct within the larger paradigm of modernity. Around the 1900s, the automobile became the epitome not only of technology, progress, or efficiency, but also of human comfort, prosperity, and health (cf. Zeller 2022; Jordan 2023). Another is that we can learn about the impact of scale (e.g., the shift from local to global) on perceptions of the environment, on conceptualizations of time and space, and on new worldviews. Automobile literature can thus be connected to significant epistemic shifts around the 1900s, with regard to the secularization of knowledge, the dawn of a new technocentric culture of growth, and incipient ecological thinking.

In our research, hybrid sources, which have both aesthetic and documentary value, attest to the productive transfer dynamics between literary form and historical context. They exemplify the interplay of scientific and cultural discourses such as the myths of American culture that promote ideas of adventure, conquest, discovery, autonomy, and freedom.

By combining literary studies and history methods, we offer new understandings of existing sources and inquire into the ways in which literature and history can be examined as complementary records shedding new light on the circulation and translation of knowledge on automobility. In reflecting new behaviors, negotiating issues of scale, and describing the reconfiguration of social and cultural values, both literature and history emerge as interconnected, mutually corrective narratives that generate new awareness about modernity, mobility, and the natural environment.

Competing Narratives

Our methodological approach enables us to compare historical and literary sources that offer competing narratives of the same historical material. Many of the novels, poems, and nonfictional narratives in our corpus are explicitly written in response to historical developments. Historical sources are significant not only in the way they contextualize such literary texts but also in the way they allow us to assess the critical force of literary works: to what extent do literary works contest or simply reproduce the dominant discourses of their time? At the same time, history is more than context. History is also an object of study, subject to revision and open to alternative narratives. Literary works can produce such alternatives by, for example, voicing the experience of people who are left out of historical accounts. In this way, literary works help contextualize historical sources, and history and literature affect each other reciprocally.

Such competing narratives become especially apparent in a central aspect of automobility: oil. More than any other natural resource, oil reveals the deep, although often unobserved, ties between automobility and the environment. The rise of automobility to a mass phenomenon in the 1910s and 1920s depended on a new market of readily available gasoline. The parallel development of the oil and automobile industry provides historical material on which many of the literary texts we examine build implicitly or explicitly. For example, Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1926) ties together the rise of automobility in Southern California and the Teapot Dome Scandal, while Mary Austin’s The Ford (1917) is a fictional rendition of the Bakersfield oil boom in the early 1900s. In many ways, these texts reflect anxieties about resource exhaustion and the environmental cost of automobility.

The Ford in particular illustrates how literary works propose competing narratives to the historical events they fictionalize. The Bakersfield oil boom, which played a central role in relocating the centers of oil production from the Appalachians to the Western United States in the early twentieth century, is told from the perspective of a single homestead family. The environmental cost of drilling is thus fundamentally reframed in comparison to typical historical accounts of the era. For example, The Ford’s depiction of what was commonly known as a “trout stream,” a stream of oil emanating from a wild gusher, deviates from historical representations such as William Rintoul’s Spudding In: Recollections of Pioneer Days in the California Oil Fields (1976). Rintoul presents the blowout of the Lakeview Gusher No. 1 of Kern County, which ranks among the most devastating oil spills in history and is close to the homestead farm Austin lived on when she first moved to California, as an epic battle between nature and man. In Rintoul’s account, the land which is virtually covered with oil serves no other possible purpose than bringing forth its natural resources. The Ford, by contrast, inextricably links the environmental cost of drilling to the despair of its main characters, whose farmland is polluted by the spill. This competing perspective on the Bakersfield oil boom reorients oil extraction in California around the idea of a deeply personal and environmental rather than an abstract, externalized conception of extractive space.

Database

To assemble, manage, and systematically analyze our corpus we built a digital open-access database. The database is already the most comprehensive collection of early American road literature worldwide. So far we have compiled a corpus of about 700 texts published between the 1890s and the 1920s. These texts cover a range of genres, from poetry and fiction to non-fiction genres like travel narratives and field science reports. We continually edit these texts and feed them into the database. To keep the workload manageable and the database focused on automobility, longer texts such as novels are not included in their entirety, but only those parts in which automobility is prominent.

Two search functions make the database distinctive as an educational and scholarly tool: text search and advanced search. Through the indexing of metadata, the text search enables a quick scan of our corpus along metacategories such as genre or year of publication. For a more thorough examination of the corpus, the advanced search is centered around keywords. Each text section – a paragraph or stanza – is meticulously annotated with content-related keywords to help identify aesthetic, technological, and environmental aspects. Together, the two search functions functionally allow for broad engagements with the corpus as well as granular text work.

The database is a collection of historical sources. It brings together texts from disjointed archives. In this way, the database is itself a form of archive. Much like conventional archives, we have organized the texts according to metacategories. We decide which metacategories exist and which texts are grouped under which metacategory. This comes with both strengths and challenges.

Defining our own metacategories allows us to connect a wide range of sources without having to abide by predetermined generic categories. Any text that is about automobility can be included in the database. The process of allocating texts to genres is flexible and open-ended, always subject to revision and reconsideration. The continuous process of choosing metacategories strengthens our collaboration as an interdisciplinary group of researchers. Due to our training in distinct fields, we bring different perspectives to the corpus. Historians, for example, have different standards for selecting evidence than literary scholars. Having to categorize and index texts that cross generic categories challenges us to think beyond disciplinary conventions and see where they overlap and diverge. This has generated lively discussions and expanded the methodological scope of our research.

Yet the database comes with its own set of methodological challenges. Currently, the database is biased toward literary genres. The overwhelming majority of texts are grouped under traditional literary genres like novels or poems. By contrast, historical sources are grouped under works of nonfiction. The many hybrid sources that work with conventional literary methods but do not claim for themselves the status of literary works are particularly difficult to categorize. As a result, the database is biased toward our criteria for classifying and selecting texts, although it seems to offer an empirical approach to the study of early automobility and the environment.

The database operates with quantitative factors such as numbers and statistics, yet a few prolific authors inflate the numbers. Measuring the impact of texts is an inherent problem for qualitative approaches. This is a challenge the database also faces and cannot solve entirely, even as we attempt to combine qualitative with quantitative research. Optimizing the balance between providing an easy-to-use educational and academic tool and acknowledging the biases of the database is an ongoing factor that pushes our reflections on methodology.

Aesthetic Patterns

By leaning into a literary approach to both literary and historical sources we draw attention to textual form. This differentiates our method from that of important non-literature trained scholars in the field (e.g., Seiler 2008). Analyzing the relationship between literary form, social structures, and automobile infrastructure helps us trace patterns of perception and representation—that is, aesthetic patterns—inspired by the emergence of automobility. We investigate how the modern phenomenon of automobility impacted the procedures of literature and prompted new modes of literary and cultural expression. In tracing these changes, we aim to elucidate to what extent historical sources work with the same aesthetic patterns that literary texts do. This is exemplified, for example, by automobile tourist guidebooks, a new genre that emerged in response to automobility. It uses aesthetic patterns to make places appealing and attract readers to a certain destination.

We use a qualitative, comparative approach to examine how structural, stylistic, and thematic patterns were adapted or transformed in both fictional and nonfictional descriptions of automobility. By tracing how language changed in response to the experiences the automobile made accessible, we identify underlying attitudes and perceptions that in turn shape the knowledge about automobility and its environments generated by these texts. This includes, for example, racially charged or gendered assumptions about who drives and where. Our main focus is on modes of relating to the environment that emerged or changed in response to automobility.

Our methodology allows us to trace the history of a number of new aesthetic concerns and categories. For instance, automobile texts provided further ground for the moralization of aesthetics by equating pollution in cities with immorality, or by casting cars as a “clean” alternative to horses. Tracing such concerns in literary texts reveals how perceptions of material phenomena were shaped—a question more often researched by historians without input from literary studies. For example, the idea of the car as a “clean” alternative was based on its not producing biological refuse that had to be cleaned off the streets and could be smelled by any passer-by. By contrast, the waste the car did produce—exhaust and noise—was initially not perceived as an issue. Literary texts played an important role in establishing these differential patterns of perception.

Semantic Shifts

Another fruitful approach that merges the methodologies of literature and history in our project is to trace the origins and shifting meanings of specific words that were in circulation to negotiate the new phenomenon of automobility. Words here become the object of both literary and historical research. To trace their genealogy, we need to interrogate historical and literary sources to make these words visible and elucidate their environmental dimension.

One of the ways to make semantic shifts visible is the process tracing method. Process tracing is a tool of qualitative analysis that examines diagnostic evidence selected and analyzed on the basis of hypotheses posed by the researcher (Collier 2011). While process tracing is adapted from political sciences and sociology, its strength lies in its applicability to diverse research objectives. We consider the various semantic patterns found in our corpus as evidence and analyze it according to our overarching project hypotheses on environmental aesthetics. A prerequisite for process tracing is to find diagnostic evidence as a basis for inference, which, for this project, means identifying a semantic pattern in a few texts and then posing a hypothesis on possible social and/or literary structures which link the different aesthetic patterns we want to examine. Then, we can set possible outcomes for our analysis before closely examining our wider corpus to trace the shifts and either confirm or disprove our hypotheses.

An example of this approach is a study by Adam Rome that traces the shifts in the meaning of the term “pollution” at the turn of the twentieth century. This term, which had previously denoted “violation, perversion, or corruption of moral standards,” later came to mean the “human degradation of the environment”. Rome uses various historical sources for this research, from medical treatises to urban regulations and industrial laws. Beyond textual analysis, this approach requires analysis of the historical context in which the semantic change occurred. In the case of “pollution,” an important context was the rise of the industrial city, which—as Rome puts it—developed “a new, complex vocabulary of pollution” (Rome 1996).

The curated and annotated corpus of early American automobility literature in our database also enables examination of such semantic shifts, which in turn generates insights into epistemic shifts in both literary and environmental history. An example we are currently exploring is the term “roadkill.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term started to be used in 1943 (Yocom 1943) and its use increased during the 50s and the 60s. However, roadkill has occurred since the arrival of the automobile in the late nineteenth century. We investigate how people described such instances before the term “roadkill” emerged and how this semantic shift occurred. The starting point of this inquiry was to search in digitized databases of scientific journals with keywords or groups of keywords that could be related to roadkill, such as “Animal” AND “Automobile” or “Animal” AND “Collision.”
We found scientific publications from the 1920s and 1930s where roadkill is described as “Automobiles and Animal Mortality” (Stoner 1929), “Automobile as a Destroyer of Wild Life” (Davis 1934),  “Wildlife Destruction by the Automobile” (Dreyer 1935), “Highway Mortality” (Stoner 1935) or “Wildlife Casualties on the Highway” (Stoner 1936). Other sources can of course be subjected to similar searches. We can then trace these terms in our database to assess them in context and identify underlying attitudes toward the relationship between humans, automobility, and the environment at the time.

Limitations and Strengths

While the integration of literary studies and historical inquiry offers distinct advantages—particularly in uncovering the aesthetic dimensions of environmental knowledge—our approach is not without its inherent limitations and potential biases. The lack of empirical evidence regarding literature’s societal impact, for instance, complicates causal claims. At the same time, historiography itself is not a neutral arbiter of facts but a discursive formation implicated in the construction of “history” as such. The near-erasure of ecological destruction  and indigenous presence in much early automobile literature, to name only two striking cases, necessitates a critical stance toward the representational limits of literature.

The risk of conflating literary texts with factual historical evidence, or vice versa, further complicates our methodology. This caution applies not only to ambiguous or hybrid genres but equally to ostensibly “purely” literary or historical sources, which are themselves shaped by rhetorical conventions, institutional contexts, and ideological commitments. Especially boundary genres such as the memoir, diary, and reportage demand heightened interpretive attentiveness, as they blur the lines between fiction and documentation. As scholars, we must remain attentive to the highly mediated, subjective nature of these sources, recognizing that neither literature nor history is a neutral repository of truth.

Crucially, however, the interpenetration of literature and history can be mobilized as a strength. Literature and historiography may speak to one another’s silences: road literature may provide intimate access to the affective and perceptual world of early automobility, yet often omits the material conditions of production, labor, or dispossession—realities that surface more clearly in historical records. For instance, the automobile factory, central to the infrastructure of automobility, is largely absent in early literary representations of automobility. This suggests that literature can serve to aestheticize structural exploitation and thus distract from it.

Moreover, the problem of anachronism or presentism—the tendency to project contemporary understandings of “environment,” “mobility,” or “technology” onto earlier periods—is an ever-present concern. However, we have noted that the dialogic interplay between historical and literary methods can act as a corrective, allowing each discipline to illuminate the blind spots and assumptions of the other. Literary readings can foreground experiential registers that historiography might overlook, while historical contextualization tempers interpretive overreach or ideological abstraction. The tracing of semantic shifts offers a particularly effective way to avoid presentism, by attending to conceptual transformations on their own historical and discursive terms.

Ultimately, by foregrounding these tensions, the project embraces the incomplete and contested nature of knowledge itself. Rather than seek closure or cohesion, our interdisciplinary approach aims to reconstruct the fragmentary aesthetic worlds of early automobility, acknowledging the silences and gaps as historically meaningful in their own right.

References

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McCarthy, Tom. Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment. Yale University Press, 2007.

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Stoner, Dayton. “Automobiles and Animal Mortality.” Science, vol. 69, no. 1800, June 28, 1929, pp. 670-671. doi:10.1126/science.69.1800.670.

—. “Highway Mortality among Mammals.” Science, vol. 81, no. 2104, Apr. 1935, pp. 401–402. doi:10.1126/science.81.2104.401.

—. “Wildlife Casualties on the Highway.” The Wilson Bulletin, vol. 48, no. 4, 1936, pp. 276–283.

Yocom, Charles F. “The Hungarian Partridge Perdix perdix Linn. in the Palouse Region, Washington.” Ecological Monographs, vol. 13, no. 2, Apr. 1943, pp. 167–201. doi:10.2307/1943527.

Zeller, Thomas. Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022.