Journeys, migration, exile, tourism – such pressing themes characteristic of today's popular culture and politics have proliferated across the terrain of academic scholarship. A recent entry in this vein is American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film, by Ann Brigham. The book's rather generic title does not do it justice. This eloquent and in-depth monograph insightfully revisits familiar road narratives previously covered, but also extends the journey narrative canon – and, more importantly, our ways of understanding it. Most impressive is how Brigham frames her inquiry in the context of post-9/11 Homeland Security culture, where mobility becomes on the one hand reinvigorated in the name of national(istic) identity, on the other hand managed and restricted in the name of fear of terrorist invasion. Another great strength is the detailed and nuanced textual analyses, which light up the book. And yet, I did have some reservations about certain sections and tactics.

A crucial introduction lays out the theoretical framework informing her textual readings. Concepts such as scale, engagement and incorporation loom large, all around her central driving notion that mobility is not simply a transparent vehicle through which road narratives function, but rather a perpetually contested and reimagined value. She uses the term “scale,” for example, to tease out the political dimensions of road narratives, where movement through space not only defamiliarizes the familiar, but also articulates various identities and social differences.

Taking a broadly chronological route, the body of the book comprises five chapters, each discussing a handful of films and works of fiction. The first chapter deals with pre-World War I literary narratives representing the search for national identity in terms of union-making; the second chapter turns to post-World War II beat and civil rights movements and the theme of “racialized masculinity.” The third chapter focusses on gender and feminist narratives of the 1980s and early 1990s; chapter 4 addresses Native American narratives of approximately the same time period, in the context of “agitating spaces” and the subversive importance of home. The final chapter considers the theme of “returning home” in relation to a certain post-9/11 revival of masculinity, one Brigham cleverly and lucidly conceives as “re/productivity.” A brief, somewhat lukewarm, epilogue concludes the book, with some afterthoughts on the film Nebraska (dir. Alexander Payne, 2013).

The first few chapters are, in my view, the most compelling. The introduction travels far in situating the recreational-vehicle boom across the US after 9/11 in relation to political discourse of the day and subsequent mobility narratives. The first chapter links this resurgence back to the road culture and literature of pre-World War I America, a textual reservoir that to my mind has not been mined much. Here she recovers several novels such as Lloyd Osbourne's Three Speeds Forward (1906), Edward Salisbury Field's A Six-Cylinder Courtship (1907), and Thomas W. Wilby and Agnes W. Wilby's On the Trail to Sunset (1912). The second chapter bristles by bringing 1960s-era road texts explicitly dealing with race – John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me (1961) and John A. Williams's This Is My Country Too (1965) – into deconstructive conversation with Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957).

To distinguish her book, the author spends much time debunking the notion that previous road-narrative studies have idealized mobility as “fixed,” as simple liberation, “the escape of tensions” (6). But I think she overstates her case, and mischaracterizes much previous road-narrative scholarship. For my part, my road movie book, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (2002), emphasizes throughout that society's conservative values consistently complicate cinematic road representations of rebellion. Devin Orgeron's more recent Road Movies : From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami (2008) – a citation omission that somewhat surprised me – likewise challenges the impulse to equate rebellion with the road. Brigham gets useful mileage out of Katie Mills's The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving through Film, Fiction, and Television (2006), which also addresses film and literature, though that book never gives the impression of fetishizing mobility as easy liberation.

In some sections, more contextual setup would have served the author well. The first chapter's “voyages into democracy” might have referenced the influential literary journeys of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain; similarly, Kerouac, John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy produced road oeuvres, not just one road novel each – though Brigham makes no mention of this. When she discusses Broken Flowers (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2005), or even Nebraska in the epilogue, there is no acknowledgement of Jim Jarmusch and Alexander Payne as primarily road-movie auteurs. Unfortunately the book ends on this note, where the epilogue, feeling a bit tacked on, misses a few opportunities: situating Nebraska in relation to senior road movies, and in relation to previous “hard-times” road movies of the 1930s and 1970s. Despite these misgivings, I welcome the book as a provocative, boundary-pushing contribution to the field of mobility studies.