Introduction: The Adrenaline Aesthetic: Speed as Culture  1

1. Speed Theory  17

2. Thriller: The Incitement to Speed  59

3. Gaining Speed: Car Culture, Adrenaline, and the Experience of Speed  111

4. Blur: Rapid Eye Movement and the Visuality of Speed  157

5. Crash Culture  199

Epilogue: Overdrive  261

Notes  273

Bibliography  285

Index  293

Winner, 2010 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize

“Duffy writes with style and passion on speed as somatic modernity. . . . “—Brian Lennon, Modern Fiction Studies

“Duffy's book makes an important contribution with its meticulous analysis of the early culture of speed.” —David N. Lucsko, Technology and Culture

“This is promising material, and the book will no doubt orient those new to the topic. Duffy makes a point of engaging multiple media. . . .”—Jessica Burstein, MLQ

“The scope and ambition of Duffy's book demand attention from scholars of early-twentieth-century culture and of the cultural roles of technology. Scholars may not take up his calls for ‘speed criticism’ (47) and a ‘politics of speed’ (213), but they will be refreshed by his apt analyses of particular cultural products in the context of the car and stirred to pay close attention to the transformative effect of automobile life on culture. For students of the novel, Duffy's Handbook furnishes useful models for analyzing novelistic representations of the experience of speed across high and low genres. “—Andrew Goldstone, Studies in the Novel

“Enda Duffy’s historical study of space and speed is a work of great breadth and immense utility. . . . While the active enjoyment of speed may in part antedate the modernist period, this well-researched and superbly-written book on speed, the automobile and the effects speed technology has on its human users in the first decades of the twentieth century, will be of great interest to both historians and scholars of modern literature, art and culture.”—J.B. Maney, Journal of Modern Literature

“[A] a must-read for any speed demon.”—Colin Marshall, Santa Barbara Independent

“The author is also, besides of being a thrilling writer, a great close-reader. The Speed Handbook considerably renews our interpretation of books like Heart of Darkness (read as a complaint against slowness, and hence much more ambivalent in its attitude against Western modernity) or Crash (read as an example of going backwards into the future, the analogy of sex and crash culture preventing us from seeing what is really new, namely the crash). But most of all it is an impressive attempt to reconstruct the speed culture as it emerged at the end of the 19th culture in all possible cultural spheres: publicity, journalism, popular culture, philosophy, and the social fabric in its whole.”—Jan Baetens, Leonardo

“[A] brilliant book . . . .”—Howard P. Segal, Times Higher Education Supplement

“This is at once a celebration of speed and a rigorous interrogation of the theory and concept of speed, a book that looks at the fascination with speed as it delves into its potentially lethal consequences. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.”—G. A. Foster, Choice

Winner, 2010 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize

“Duffy writes with style and passion on speed as somatic modernity. . . . “—Brian Lennon, Modern Fiction Studies

“Duffy's book makes an important contribution with its meticulous analysis of the early culture of speed.” —David N. Lucsko, Technology and Culture

“This is promising material, and the book will no doubt orient those new to the topic. Duffy makes a point of engaging multiple media. . . .”—Jessica Burstein, MLQ

“The scope and ambition of Duffy's book demand attention from scholars of early-twentieth-century culture and of the cultural roles of technology. Scholars may not take up his calls for ‘speed criticism’ (47) and a ‘politics of speed’ (213), but they will be refreshed by his apt analyses of particular cultural products in the context of the car and stirred to pay close attention to the transformative effect of automobile life on culture. For students of the novel, Duffy's Handbook furnishes useful models for analyzing novelistic representations of the experience of speed across high and low genres. “—Andrew Goldstone, Studies in the Novel

“Enda Duffy’s historical study of space and speed is a work of great breadth and immense utility. . . . While the active enjoyment of speed may in part antedate the modernist period, this well-researched and superbly-written book on speed, the automobile and the effects speed technology has on its human users in the first decades of the twentieth century, will be of great interest to both historians and scholars of modern literature, art and culture.”—J.B. Maney, Journal of Modern Literature

“[A] a must-read for any speed demon.”—Colin Marshall, Santa Barbara Independent

“The author is also, besides of being a thrilling writer, a great close-reader. The Speed Handbook considerably renews our interpretation of books like Heart of Darkness (read as a complaint against slowness, and hence much more ambivalent in its attitude against Western modernity) or Crash (read as an example of going backwards into the future, the analogy of sex and crash culture preventing us from seeing what is really new, namely the crash). But most of all it is an impressive attempt to reconstruct the speed culture as it emerged at the end of the 19th culture in all possible cultural spheres: publicity, journalism, popular culture, philosophy, and the social fabric in its whole.”—Jan Baetens, Leonardo

“[A] brilliant book . . . .”—Howard P. Segal, Times Higher Education Supplement

“This is at once a celebration of speed and a rigorous interrogation of the theory and concept of speed, a book that looks at the fascination with speed as it delves into its potentially lethal consequences. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.”—G. A. Foster, Choice

“The Speed Handbook is a tour de force, a crash-course in speed and space. The effervescent prose and the quicksilver deployment of Enda Duffy’s scholarship are such that the book fairly vibrates with insight and cogency. As Duffy catalogs speed in its many indices and instances, most of the familiar genres and all of the modernist pieties we thought we knew are overturned. And the rubric of speed gives Duffy license to range over the domains of children’s literature or contemporary advertising or car races with the same lavish attention he gives to avant-garde art or modernist totems such as James Joyce. I am deeply impressed by this book and indebted to its energy, salience, and comprehensiveness.”—Jennifer Wicke, University of Virginia

“The Speed Handbook is not just a dazzling book but a necessary one. There is nothing else like it. Enda Duffy insists on the political stakes of speed, persuasively connecting the emergence of speed as the ‘only new pleasure invented by modernity’ with commodity fetishism, the sensorium, gender, ‘endocolonization,’ ‘adrenaline aesthetics,’ and social control. This superlative work will become required reading for scholars of modernism, historians of technology, materialist critics, and even egg-headed car lovers.”—Paul K. Saint-Amour, author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination

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