The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television

The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television





"Katie Mills makes connections that illuminate the material for today’s readers as well as the future generations who will come to Beat literature looking for answers of their own. This is an important bookâ€"read it!" â€"Ann Charters, author of Kerouac: A Biography

"The Road Story and the Rebel contains some of the best discussion of road movies I have ever read, taking on at once fiction and nonfiction prose, film, TV, music, and the Internet." â€"Ronald Primeau, author of Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway

"A confident and sweeping overview…The emphasis on the role of women in the development of the New Hollywood road narrative, attention to the distinctive contributions of Route 66 and the biker film, and the treatment of less familiar novels are especially welcome and original." â€"Corey K. Creekmur, University of Iowa

In The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television, Katie Mills traces the evolution of stories of automobilityâ€"autonomy and mobilityâ€"from the Beats’ postwar literary adventures to today’s postmodern reality television shows and digital interactions. Within the road genre, Mills contends, we find profound insights into social movements and identity transformations, as each new generation challenges the narrative conventions of rebellion and adapts film or electronic media to create its own declarations of independence set on the road.

Ever since Kerouac celebrated the postwar road, rejecting the sad spaces of Depression-era reportage and noir films, this multimedia genre has cycled between margin and mainstream, innovation and commodification. Mills traces critiques of the romanticized Beat visions by African American and feminist contemporaries, shows how television moved the genre into 1960s prime time, and follows the psychedelic journeys of novelist Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. In underground and drive-in theaters, the road film evolved in sexualized biker movies like Scorpio Rising, The Wild Angels, and Easy Rider, then became mainstreamed in the early films of today’s greatest directorsâ€"Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, and other auteurs. Although feminist writers Joan Didion and Betty Friedan rejected the macho mobility of these films of the seventies, the next generation of women and minority storytellers embraced automobility and offered alternatives to postmodernism’s! loss of faith in rebellion, revitalizing the genre in the 1990s with remappings like Thelma and Louise and MTV’s Road Rules. Including in her research new works from the twenty-first century, Mills effectively explores the cultural significance of sixty years of rebellion in film, literature, television, and digital media.

The Road Story and the Rebel, which includes twenty illustrations, offers interdisciplinary insights to scholars and students of genre, film and media studies, and cultural studies by revealing how rebels with a cause consistently revise the road genre.









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