As the original American sports car, the Chevrolet Corvette has come to represent power, freedom and sexuality for more than half a century. Yet it also hints at personal identity and style, suggesting how effectively values and meaning are communicated through an object. Using various critical perspectives, this close analysis of this highly recognizable automobile finds diverse aspects of American culture revealed. Topics covered include the Corvette in literature; its ties to masculine identity, including homosexuality, as well as female sexuality; and the Corvette as artistic object, among others.

Details every model, including prototypes and factory racers.

Get the official story behind the eighth generation of Chevrolet’s legendary sports car in this licensed book featuring engaging text and photography from GM’s archives and Corvette team members. This updated edition of Corvette Stingray is revised to cover the C8’s latest developments, including the 70th Anniversary model, high-performance Z06, and the all-new hybrid E-Ray. Corvette is Chevrolet’s iconic performance car. Its importance and status in the performance-car world cannot be overstated. Thus each new Corvette generation is sweated by Chevy’s designers, engineers, marketing staff, and executives to ensure that it sets the bar higher than the preceding version. With the eighth generation, Chevrolet did more than raise the bar or move the goalpost—they tore down the stadium and rebuilt it from scratch. For the first time ever in a production version, the Corvette featured a mid-engine configuration. Though Corvette engineers had experimented with this engine placement for several decades, 2020 marked the first time Chevrolet had committed it to production cars. The seventh-generation Corvette had prodigious power on tap and excellent performance, but its front-engine configuration had reached its traction limit with increasing horsepower levels. The mid-engine Corvette eliminated any remaining barriers and took the battle to supercar rivals like Ferrari, Lamborghini, and McLaren. With the new Z06 and E-Ray versions, Corvette brought even more heat to the competition. Corvette Stingray reveals the story every Corvette fan needs to read.

The complete and official history of America's original sports car, right up to the much-buzzed-about eighth generation Stingray supercar released in late 2019, written by Corvette authority Randy Leffingwell and illustrated with imagery straight from the GM archives.

The Routledge Companion to Automobile Heritage, Culture, and Preservation explores automotive heritage, its place in society, and the ways we might preserve and conserve it. Drawing on contributions from academics and practitioners around the world and comprising six sections, this volume carries the heritage discourse forward by exploring the complex and sometimes intricate place of automobiles within society. Taken as a whole, this book helps to shape how we think about automobile heritage and considers how that heritage explores a range of cultural, intellectual, emotional, and material elements well outside of the automobile body itself. Most importantly, perhaps, it questions how we might better acknowledge the importance of automotive heritage now and in the future. The Routledge Companion to Automobile Heritage, Culture, and Preservation is unique in that it juxtaposes theory with practice, academic approaches with practical experience, and recognizes that issues of preservation and conservation belong in a broad context. As such, this volume should be essential reading for both academics and practitioners with an interest in automobiles, cultural heritage, and preservation.

This lavishly illustrated, deluxe book--as stylish as the car itself--tells the story of how the Corvette, a uniquely American icon, became one of the world's most popular sports cars. More than 200 color and 1,000 b&w photos.

Bicycles have more cultural identities than many realize, functioning not only as literal vehicles in a text but also as “vehicles” for that text’s themes, ideas, and critiques. In the late nineteenth century the bicycle was seen as a way for the wealthy urban elite to reconnect with nature and for women to gain a measure of personal freedom, while during World War II it became a utilitarian tool of the French Resistance and in 1970s China stood for wealth and modernization. Lately it has functioned variously as the favored ideological steed of environmentalists, a means of community bonding and aesthetic self-expression in hip hop, and the ride of choice for bike messenger–idolizing urban hipsters. Culture on Two Wheels analyzes the shifting cultural significance of the bicycle by examining its appearances in literary, musical, and cinematic works spanning three continents and more than 125 years of history. Bringing together essays by a variety of cyclists and scholars with myriad angles of approach, this collection highlights the bicycle’s flexibility as a signifier and analyzes the appearance of bicycles in canonical and well-known texts such as Samuel Beckett’s modernist novel Molloy, the Oscar-winning film Breaking Away, and various Stephen King novels and stories, as well as in lesser-known but equally significant texts, such as the celebrated Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Sacrifice and Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s nineteenth-century travelogue A Canterbury Pilgrimage, the latter of which traces the route of Chaucer’s pilgrims via bicycle. Listen to an interview with the author.