The essays collected within this volume ask how literary practices are shaped by the experience of being at sea—and also how they forge that experience. Individual chapters explore the literary worlds of naval ships, whalers, commercial vessels, emigrant ships, and troop transports from the seventeenth to the twentieth-first century, revealing a rich history of shipboard reading, writing, and performing. Contributors are interested both in how literary activities adapt to the maritime world, and in how individual and collective shipboard experiences are structured through—and framed by—such activities. In this respect, the volume builds on scholarship that has explored reading as a spatially situated and embodied practice. As our contributors demonstrate, the shipboard environment and the ocean beyond it place the mind and body under peculiar forms of pressure, and these determine acts of reading—and of writing and performing—in specific ways.
Arvustused
I found every one of the ten chapters absolutely fascinating. A real strength of the collection is its coherence. The extent of cross-referencing across the chapters indicates a particularly careful editing process, and helps the main themes to emerge more strongly from the book as a whole. Shipboard Literary Cultures is a formidable work of collaborative scholarship and will be of great interest to scholars across all areas of maritime studies and book history. (Faye Hammill, The Mariner's Mirror, April 28, 2023)
|
1 Introduction: Shipboard Literary Cultures and the Stain of the Sea |
|
|
1 | (40) |
|
|
|
|
|
2 Books with Providence: The Power and Influence of Book Ownership on a Seventeenth-Century Man-of-War |
|
|
41 | (22) |
|
|
|
3 The Sailing Ship as a School of Virtue |
|
|
63 | (22) |
|
|
|
4 Recognition and Anonymity: Shipboard Theatricals and Newspapers Aboard USS Macedonian |
|
|
85 | (22) |
|
|
|
5 Shipboard Diaries as Navigational Instruments |
|
|
107 | (24) |
|
|
|
|
|
6 The Maritime Self on the American Whaleship |
|
|
131 | (26) |
|
|
|
7 Writing the Cabin as Cloister in the Diary of Sister Mary Paul Mulquin |
|
|
157 | (28) |
|
|
|
8 The Torrens as a Space of Writing, Reading, and Performance |
|
|
185 | (26) |
|
|
|
9 Communities of Print at Sea and Beyond: Troopship Magazines in World War I |
|
|
211 | (28) |
|
|
|
10 Learning at Sea: Education Aboard the 1926-27 Floating University |
|
|
239 | (24) |
|
|
|
11 Afterword: Down to the Sea in Ships |
|
|
263 | (18) |
|
|
| Index |
|
281 | |
Susann Liebich is Assistant Professor of Modern History at Heidelberg University, Germany. She is a co-author of The Transported Imagination (Cambria Press, 2018) and has published on the history of reading and on Australian and New Zealand periodicals in the interwar period. Her current research focuses on the sea in personal writing and popular print culture.
Laurence Publicover is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Dramatic Geography (Oxford University Press, 2017) and of several articles on early modern literature, maritime culture, and their intersections. His current research focuses on the deep sea and seabed in literary and non-literary contexts.
