Reading the Road, from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways

Explores how cultural conceptions of mobility and the road contribute to identity and culture in early modern Britain

• Opens new windows on early modern culture, subjectivity and perceptions around the experience of the road and how that shapes the idea of the road itself
• Offers insight into the ways both the bare boards of the stage and prose narratives were used to imagine road journeys and the intersections between public and private space
• Enhances historical understanding of the literal place of theatre in the road networks around early modern London
• Provides a crucial ligature in English literary and cultural history. The present plays and prose are prolegomena to the travel literature of Montagu, Swift, Boswell and Johnson in the Hebrides, Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Fielding's Tom Jones, and peripatetic Civil War narratives

This book brings together thirteen essays, by both established and emerging scholars, which examine the most influential meanings of roads in early modern literature and culture. Chapters develop our understanding of the place of the road in the early modern imagination and open various windows on a geography which may by its nature seem passing or trivial but is in fact central to all conceptions of movement. They also shed new light on perhaps the most astonishing achievement of early modern plays: their use of one small, bare space to suggest an amazing variety of physical and potentially metaphysical locations.