The reach of the car today is almost universal, and its effect on landscapes, cityscapes, cultures_indeed, on the very fabric of the modern world_is profound. Autopia is the first book to consider the culture of the automobile in the widest possible sense, covering themes such as cars and architecture, advertising, art, cities, design, driving, sexuality, film, literature, highways, music, national identity, rage, semiotics, and traffic jams. Autopia is also truly global_individual essays deal with cars and culture not only in the U.S. and Western Europe, but also in Romania, the former Soviet Union, Japan, China, South Africa, India and Cuba.

Autopia is not written by car buffs or technical enthusiasts_it consists of more than 25 newly com-missioned essays, as well as a number of reprinted key texts, by writers, critics, historians, artists and film-makers, all of whom share not just an interest in, but a critical concern with, the consequences of a century of driving. In Autopia the car is treated not as a technological fetish object or as an instrument of danger. Instead it is examined as a hugely important determinant of 20th-century culture, neither wholly good nor an unmitigated disaster, and certainly endlessly fascinating.

Peter Wollen is Professor of Film Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.