Main Page

Welcome to the Off the Road Database! This database collects American road literature from the early decades of automobility. It is part of the ERC-funded research project "Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility." Our focus is on poems, fiction, and non-fiction narratives from the 1890s through the 1920s, but we are open to all texts that are within the public domain under European copyright law.

Here is how it works.

You are currently on the main page, where you will see a list of all texts currently available. This is our text search, and it is best used to organize the text corpus by genre, year of publication, and other filtering options. The search results are organized alphabetically. You can arrange them in a different order by clicking on “order by” in the top right corner and selecting the parameter of your choice. By clicking on any search result, you will be directed to the respective text page.

For a comprehensive overview of all texts, click on “Browse wiki by texts” on the very left. The same goes for a comprehensive overview of all authors. Simply click on “Browse wiki by authors.”

For a detailed search in which you can look for texts using our annotated keywords, visit the advanced search. There, you will find an overview of all searchable keywords in the infographic. You can combine several keywords and even other search parameters. Please note that the advanced search is geared toward finding individual paragraphs and stanzas. If you click on any search result, you will be directed to the exact paragraph or stanza in the text. The advanced search is an “and” search. If you are looking for poems by African American authors, for example, the other search fields will offer an overview of only those keywords, years of publication, and so on which have been used for African American poets. The advanced search works best if you provide lots of input, so you can find exactly what you are looking for.