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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. You can browse the database by texts and by authors.

The text search works like a library catalog: you can search for titles, authors, etc. With the advanced search you can search the full texts and the annotation keywords we added to identify various aspects of automobility (technologies, environments, the experience of driving, etc.) and aesthetic strategies of representing these aspects. The advanced search will direct you to specific stanzas in poems or paragraphs in prose texts.

Contact us if you would like to add texts or annotations!