Fast Cars and Bad Girls

Book excerpt: Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women's Road Stories explores the road narratives of women and the various ways their work re-maps American space. Moving from Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative to the frontier texts of the American West to the postapocalyptic novels of postmodern experience, Fast Cars and Bad Girls interrogates the intersections of nomadic theory and contemporary feminism. What would happen, the text queries the reader, if Jack Kerouac had gone on the road with a baby in the back seat? Women's road texts are different, insists author Deborah Paes de Barros; notions such as resistance to the West, the revision of the natural world, mother-daughter relationships, avant-garde angst, and feminist utopias construct this discussion of women travel writers.