What’s gone wrong with my road novel? A practice-based road trip through mobility, class and social trauma in contemporary England

This paper provides a snapshot of my practice-based PhD, in which I am using the road as a leitmotif in a collection of texts about cultural identity, class, and social trauma in post 1980's England.
Since the development of the 18th century British turnpike network, road narratives have provided a means for cultural interrogation, utilising the radically shrunken space-time of speedy travel to bring disparate social discourses into closer proximity.
This carnivalization of voices is counter-hegemonic, according to the literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, and the road genre has, historically, provided a means for writers to challenge dominant cultural narratives.
The road threads my identity, one that was moulded by radical shifts in the post-war mobility of my parents, but then fractured by divorce and my dad’s subsequent relocation to the U.S., the economic and gendered immobility of my mother, and my childhood navigating a space between the dead-end roads of post-industrial England and the seemingly limitless highways of Reagan’s America.
My thesis began as a road novel but the form quickly proved insufficient for my developing research interests, so I discarded it. My paper explores the challenges of writing road stories in a society which privileges expedience and destination over wandering and dialogue, on roads which alienate the traveller and render places invisible.
The project has become a multimodal assemblage of texts that better reflects our fragmented cultural landscape, drawing on Bakhtin’s chronotope and dialogism as conceptual frameworks, and responding to the call for interdisciplinary approaches in The New Mobilities Paradigm.
My writing explores the interplay between neoliberal ideals of mobility and individual social pain, the road acting as a literary nexus between subjective and collective experiences of dislocation and trauma that, perhaps, prevents us from driving to new, post-capitalist frontiers.