Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The Victorian and Edwardian periods were characterized by enthusiasm, trepidation, and alarm about the rapidly accelerating changes in transportation modes.  While the expanding railway system transformed rural and urban England and fueled manufacturing, commercial travel, and domestic tourism, railway travel raised concerns about its effects with new illnesses such as railway neurosis and railway insanity.  Disastrous railway accidents and crashes mesmerized the public with horrifying and spectacular details.  The bicycle’s different iterations from mid-century on increased the public’s mobility in varying degrees of affordability, stimulated improvements in road construction, and produced a new type of cosmopolitan globe-trotter even while the “bicycle” itself came to represent the alarmingly independent New Woman.  Hot air, gas, and hydrogen balloons, despite the occasional catastrophic explosive accidents, fanned the appetite for lavish aeronautical entertainment, and advanced military, meteorological, and structural engineering.  The motor-car energized and promoted trade, travel, and infrastructural improvements, even while its noise, exhaust, and speeds intimidated and terrorized.  Luxury steam yachts boosted commercial tourism’s existing popular trips through the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and beyond. 

This Humanities special issue addresses the many ways these exhilarating, thrilling, troubling, and/or distressing modes registered in the period’s cultural imagination.  For instance, how did the periodical press respond with, perhaps, new publications devoted exclusively to motoring and cycling with magazines that flourished or failed?  How did advertisements for costume, accessories, medicines, all the accoutrements necessary for a novice or seasoned participant construct a particular type and fan the public’s investment in these new transportation and exploration modes?  How did the controversies and celebrations about motoring, cycling, train travel figure prominently in literary and artistic representation in the period’s fiction, essays, satire, sociological and medical studies?  Who were the celebrity afficionados associated with these new modes who promoted them so adamantly?  Lady Mary Jeune and the Prince of Wales, for instance, with the motor car; the Pennells with the bicycle.  We invite submissions that consider but are not limited to these questions.  This special issue stresses the interdisciplinary richness evident in this exciting late-nineteenth century period. 

Please send an abstract of 500 words with a short bibliography and up-to-date cv to Dr. Joellen Masters at joellenm@bu.edu by September 15, 2025.

Finished essays of 6000-12,000 words (not including bibliographic information) will be due March 15, 2026 for an expected publication date in May.