Innovative, Imaginative, and Inventive: Adventures and Adventurers in Victorian and Edwardian Transportation
A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 May 2026 | Viewed by 35
Special Issue Editor
Interests: British literature; victorian literature and culture; women’s studies and feminist theory; cultural studies; art history; film and film theory; expository composition
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 railroad system transformed rural and urban England and fueled manufacturing, commerce, and domestic tourism, railway travel raised concerns about new illnesses such as railway neurosis and railway insanity and disastrous railway crashes mesmerized the public with horrifying and spectacular details. The bicycle’s different iterations from mid-century on increased the public’s mobility, 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 explosions, 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 speed 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 builds on an existing and lively scholarship in continuing to investigate the diverse ways these exhilarating, thrilling, troubling, and/or distressing modes of transportation and exploration registered in the period’s cultural imagination. For instance, how did the periodical press respond with new publications, advice columns, photo essays, serialized first-person testimonials? How did advertisements for costume, accessories, medicines, all the accoutrements necessary for a novice or seasoned participant construct particular types of hobbyists or experts? How did the controversies and celebrations about motoring, cycling, train travel figure prominently in the period’s fiction, essays, satire, sociological, and medical studies? Who were the celebrity afficionados associated with these new modes and 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 15 September 2025.
Finished essays of 6000–12,000 words (not including bibliographic information) will be due 15 March 2026 for an expected publication date in May.
Dr. Joellen Masters
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- travel innovation and innovators
- invention and inventors
- literary genre
- the railway
- aeronautics
- intrepid women
- victorian and fin-de-siècle recreation
- transport press
- domestic tourism
- cosmopolitanism
- yachting and tourism
- the motorcar
- fin-de-siècle celebrity tourists
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