Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
618
result(s) for
"Ocean Fiction."
Sort by:
Atlantic
Explore what the Atlantic Ocean is, how far it stretches, how the moon affects it, and other characteristics as described by the ocean itself.
Book
Nigger of the Narcissus
Often overlooked because of its controversial title, this novel from Joseph Conrad features a black West Indian protagonist, James Wait, who serves as a sailor on the merchant vessel known as
eBook
The last cruise : a novel
\"The 1950s vintage ocean liner Queen Isabella is making her final voyage before heading to the scrapyard. For the guests on board, among them Christine Thorne, a former journalist turned Maine farmer, it's a chance to experience the bygone mid-twentieth century era of decadent luxury cruising, complete with fine dining, classic highballs, string quartets, and sophisticated jazz. Smoking is allowed but not cell phones-- or children, for that matter. The Isabella sets sail from Long Beach, California into calm seas on a two-week retro cruise to Hawaii and back. But this is the second decade of an uncertain new millennium, not the sunny, heedless '50s, and certain disquieting signs of strife and malfunction above and below decks intrude on the festivities ... When a time of crisis begins, Christine, Mick, and Miriam find themselves facing the unknown together in an unexpected and startling test of their characters\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Views from Other Boats
In reflecting on Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, set in the waters of the Indian Ocean, this essay highlights the role a historical imaginary can play in undergirding the claims to explanatory truth made by historians in their interpretations of the past. While historians work within the conventions and strictures of professionalized practice and are uneasy about utilizing historical fiction to animate their work, the essay suggests, through a consideration of the books of Ghosh, that bringing these two modes of inquiry into relation with one another can produce a mutually beneficial dialogue about the nature of sources, archives, and the methodologies we use in producing accounts of the past. This is especially so for those stories involving individuals at the “margins” of history whose voices it is challenging to recover. The essay draws attention in this regard, though, to some of the problems in Ghosh’s attempts to reinscribe into the history of the ocean the idea of an Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism that is seen to have been eroded over time. It challenges, further, the trilogy’s reinforcing of a teleology of the ocean as a British lake whose dynamics were defined by the logics of empire and driven by the force of capital, by pointing to the continued significance of South Asian vernacular mercantile networks in maintaining commercial interests through institutional arrangements and mechanisms that East India Company capitalists could not penetrate or define.
Journal Article
Sail away
The phone hasn't rung for months. Suzy Marshall is discovering that work can be sluggish for an actress over sixty--even for the star of a wildly popular 1980s TV series. So when her agent offers her the plum role of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich, it seems like a godsend. Until, that is, the play is abruptly cancelled under suspicious circumstances and Suzy is forced to take a job on a cruise ship to get home. Meanwhile Amanda Herbert finds herself homeless in rainy Clapham. The purchase of her new apartment has fallen through, and her children are absorbed in their own dramas. Then she spots an advertisement for an Atlantic cruise and realizes that a few weeks onboard would tide her over and save her money until her housing situation is resolved. As the two women set sail on a new adventure, neither can possibly predict the questionable characters and strange dealings they will encounter, nor the unexpected rewards they will reap.
Book
Voyage Out
Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
eBook
The cat's table
A new novel, by turns poignant and electrifying, about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a sea voyage.
Book
Storytelling and the Spectrum of the Past
This article is a response to four contributions to a forum on the author’s cycle of novels, the Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015). The novels are set in India and China around the time of the first Opium War (1839–1842 C.E.). The author argues that historical fiction is one of several modes of discourse about the past, and that while academic history is certainly the most authoritative of these discursive fields, it also shares certain commonalities with historical fiction. There are, for example, some areas of overlap between historical fiction and such branches of academic history as microhistory and military history, especially in their envisaging of time. There are areas of overlap also between historical fiction and histories of affect and emotion. The article also touches on the expansion of India-China studies in recent years, and the rich possibilities that have been opened up by this development.
Journal Article
Buying stocks (and solid gold submarines!)
When deep-sea mining for gold and silver in the Pacific Ocean triggers a series of earthquakes, threatening a nearby island, Benji Franklin is called upon to use his amazing problem solving skills--and personal submarine--to stop the shaking and save the island's people from disaster.
Book
Amitav Ghosh and the Art of Thick Description
This response to Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy examines the scholarly merits of these novels as works of microhistory, in which the author’s devotion to what we might term “thick description” (following the anthropologist Clifford Geertz) produces numerous fresh understandings. It argues that the standout features of these novels are Ghosh’s re-creations of historical spaces and historical languages, both of which provide invaluable insights for scholars and students, who rarely have the available time and resources to recover the same degree of microscopic detail. In addition, this essay addresses Ghosh’s credentials as a historian who tackles broader historiographical concerns by comparing his depiction of the British imperial trades in indentured labor and opium with the arguments made by certain revisionist historians. It suggests that one weakness of Ghosh’s first installment in the Ibis Trilogy is his failure to read Victorian primary sources with a sufficiently critical eye. However, it concludes that overall Ghosh remains a historiographical torchbearer who over much of his career has explored the past connections and convergences of the Indian Ocean world well ahead of the academic curve.
Journal Article