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Introduction

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Book cover Mobility, Memory and the Lifecourse in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture

Part of the book series: Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture ((SMLC))

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Abstract

Chapter 1 presents the conceptual origins of the book: namely, how it grew out of: the author’s previous monograph, Pearce, Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness (Edinburgh University Press, 2016b); her earlier work on the discourse of romantic love (in particular, the significance of repetition); and a triangulation of the work of the anthropologist, Tim Ingold, the geographer, David Seamon, and the philosopher, Henri Bergson. All these sources point to the formative role of mobilities of different kinds in the generation and sustenance of intimate personal relationships (including bereavement and other loss)—from walking and driving to the “micro-mobilities” of the body—and it is this hypothesis that the book proceeds to explore through close readings of twentieth-century diaries, memoirs, fiction and poetry. These texts, and the structure of the book as a whole, are also introduced here.

Everybody has their personal path and is known by it

… Paths have their stories just as people do.

(Ingold 2016 , xvi)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The British Class System is immensely complex and subject to many different classifications and interpretations. It is important to note that it has also continued to evolve and the categories used to define class in Britain in the twenty-first century are not the same as those used in the mid to late twentieth-century when many of my authors were writing. Most classifications nevertheless depend upon evaluations which combine wealth, occupation and education, although the rise of the “lower middle” class (which Nella Last and her husband may be seen to belong to) in the mid-twentieth century prioritised wealth and occupation over education (Last’s husband owned a small joinery business). The twentieth-century National Readership Survey identified six discrete social classes in Britain based largely on occupation and skill-level: (A) Higher Managerial, Administrative; (B) Intermediate Managerial, Administrative or Professional; (C1) Supervisory or Junior Managerial, Administrative or Professional; (C2) Skilled Manual Workers; (D) Semi and Unskilled Manual Workers; (E) Casual or Lowest Grade Workers, Pensioners and those who depend upon the state. In 2001, the Office of National Statistics expanded the grades (now 1–8) with the owners of small business owners (like the Lasts) graded as 4 (rather than C1 or C2 as they would have been previously). Working with the twentieth-century classifications, the diarists featured in this book may be classed—depending upon their family background, wealth and profession—accordingly: May Sarton (A); Doreen Bates (B); Audrey Deacon C1; Nella and William Last C2.

  2. 2.

    “Movement” and “mobility”: As discussed in Chap. 2, it is important to distinguish between these two terms since, following the definitions of Cresswell (2006) and others, mobility is now typically understood as movement that is inscribed by social, historical and political significance. While a good deal of personal mobility falls into this category on account of the fact that it is socially framed—e.g., all transport mobilities including walking—it remains useful to recognise that some bodily movements and gestures are less obviously subject to such signification and are seen to arise from “motor-skills” (Merleau-Ponty 2002) or unconscious processes. Therefore, whenever I use one or other of these terms in the pages that follow I do so advisedly.

  3. 3.

    “Systems-based approaches”: Here I am referring to posthumanist theories and methodologies such as Actor Network Theory [ANT] and the ‘assemblage’ theories deriving from Deleuze and Guattari’s work (Deleuze and Guattari 2013). See Chap. 2 for further discussion and clarification.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English & Creative Writing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Lynne Pearce

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  1. Lynne Pearce
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Pearce, L. (2019). Introduction. In: Mobility, Memory and the Lifecourse in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23910-7_1

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