Fast Cars and Bad Girls

The Author: Deborah Paes de Barros received her Ph.D. in American literature from the University of California, Riverside. Her publications include essays on contemporary literature and postmodernism. Dr. Paes de Barros is currently Associate Professor of English at Palomar College in San Marcos, California.

«In this brilliant study, Deborah Paes de Barros opens with a powerful analysis of the richness, complexity, and ambiguity of the tropes of travel, the road, frontier, the questing American hero, and the journey as symbolic of male power struggles to control space, time, and borders. Against this dominant male genre of the road novel, ‘Fast Cars and Bad Girls’ reveals the ways that nomadic female road heroes in the works of women and minoritized writers from Mary Rowlandson to Paula Sharp challenge, resist, and disrupt the hegemonic, patriarchal order. By rejecting the rules of the road, boundaries, and genres, the women writers examined here create nomadic communities of lovers, children, and sisters bonded by love rather than by social conventions and gives us texts that expand the horizons of American fiction. This exciting book opens new territory for the study of American fiction.» (Emory Elliott, University Professor, University of California, Riverside, Director, Center for Ideas & Society)