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Browsing Department of English by Author "Buchanan, Dave"
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Item Love on wheels: American cycling-romance novels of the early 1880s(2021) Buchanan, DaveRomantic fiction about cycling—sometimes called “cycling romance” (Chen) or “romantic bicycling fiction” (Hanlon)—is usually considered to have emerged in the 1890s, during the great “bicycle boom” that peaked mid-decade in North America, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere (Herlihy 251). High-wheel cycling had been popular in certain circles (mainly among well-off athletic men) as far back as the 1870s, but, in the late 1880s, the rise of the more affordable and accessible safety bicycle (with same-size wheels, much like bicycles today) and technical innovations (such as the pneumatic tire) led to an explosion in cycling’s popularity.Item Pilgrims on wheels: the Pennells, F. W. Bockett, and literary cycle travels(2016) Buchanan, DaveLaurence Sterne, eighteenth- century author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, never rode a tricycle. He couldn’t have. The earliest prototype of bicycles and tricycles, the Draisine or hobbyhorse, wasn’t invented until after 1810, fifty years after Sterne died. But according to early cycle-travel writers Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell writing in 1887, Sterne would surely have appreciated leisure cycle travel, at least in the Pennells’ tandem-tricycle style; for it was, they claim, perfectly suited to Sterne’s meandering, sentimental disposition. In the dedicatory letter to the long- dead Sterne in Our Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, the Pennells claim that Sterne would have preferred cycle travel even to a railway carriage and that on a tandem tricycle with its two seats, Sterne “would still have a place for ‘the lady,’” a sly nod to the flirtatious tendencies of Sterne’s narrator in A Sentimental Journey, Mr. Yorick.Item "The stutter of the world beneath you": the literature of cycle travel(2022) Buchanan, DaveThe earliest accounts of cycle travel, from the 1870s, mostly in magazines in England and America, tended to be not so much literary as itinerary: plain-prose descriptive narratives of distances rode, places visited, and technical and logistical details about things like road conditions, supply points, and accommodation. The three main types of cycle-travel writers that emerged in the late nineteenth century – pilgrims, ramblers, and adventurers – remain responsible for the vast majority of cycle-travel literature produced today. Not all cycle-travel writers emphasize destinations or specific routes the way pilgrims do. In fact, a vibrant tradition of cycle-travel writing from the 1890s to the 1940s is more concerned with celebrating the experience of the ride as an end in itself. Both pilgrims and ramblers tend to take a leisurely, recreational, small-scale approach to travel, one that emphasizes interactions between traveller, place, history, texts, and nature rather than distances covered and difficult terrain traversed.