Abstract
This chapter explores how the ‘grandeur’ of early ‘heroic’ aviators transferred during the interwar period to a new class of modern subject: the airline passenger. Looking at representations of passengers, pilots and flight in contemporary accounts of aeroplane travel, as well as literary representations by Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh, it investigates the role of the literary imagination in apprehending the thrilling if sometimes unsettling experience of flight. The airline passenger engages the literary imagination to mediate and structure their fantasies of flight as idyllic, aerial pastoral, ethereal visions that aim to transcend the inconveniences and encumbrances of embodiment persisting in the materiality of airliners in interwar Britain.
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Hemmings, R. (2020). ‘Off the Ground and Through the Looking-Glass’: Airliners, Imagination and the Construction of the Modern Air Passenger. In: McCluskey, M., Seaber, L. (eds) Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_6
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