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

Una Brogan is an independent researcher and translator. Her PhD was completed at Université Paris 7-Diderot and she subsequently taught at Université Lyon 3-Jean Moulin. Originally from Northern Ireland, she took degrees in French, history, literary translation and comparative literature at Oxford, Warwick and Paris IV-Sorbonne universities. She has also worked as a bicycle courier, for a migrants’ rights NGO and is involved in environmental activism. She has contributed chapters on bicycles in literature to edited collections and journals, including Mobilities, Literature, Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Texts on Two Wheels: Bicycles in Literature and on Screen(University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

The marvel of this book is the way in which Brogan deftly moves between discussions of the essential canonical writers on the bicycle and more unexpected, obscure writers, as well as the way in which she nimbly draws upon theories of spatiality, technology, and objects to energize her analyses.

• Table of IllustrationsIntroduction1. Text and Transport2. Liberation on two wheels: class, gender and the bicycle in literature3. The body and the machine: the sensory discoveries of the cyclist4. Moving forward: space, time and the bicycleConclusion