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Jack London and the Sea
The first book-length study of London as a maritime
writer Jack London’s fiction has been studied
previously for its thematic connections to the ocean, but
Jack London and the Sea marks the first time that his
life as a writer has been considered extensively in relationship
to his own sailing history and interests. In this new study,
Anita Duneer claims a central place for London in the maritime
literary tradition, arguing that for him romance and nostalgia
for the Age of Sail work with and against the portrayal of a
gritty social realism associated with American naturalism in
urban or rural settings. The sea provides a dynamic setting for
London’s navigation of romance, naturalism, and realism to
interrogate key social and philosophical dilemmas of modernity:
race, class, and gender. Furthermore, the maritime tradition
spills over into texts that are not set at sea.
Jack London and the Sea does not address all of
London’s sea stories, but rather identifies key maritime
motifs that influenced his creative process. Duneer’s
critical methodology employs techniques of literary and cultural
analysis, drawing on extensive archival research from a wealth of
previously unpublished biographical materials and other sources.
Duneer explores London’s immersion in the lore and
literature of the sea, revealing the extent to which his writing
is informed by travel narratives, sensational sea yarns, and the
history of exploration, as well as firsthand experiences as a
sailor in the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean. Organized
thematically, chapters address topics that interested London:
labor abuses on “Hell-ships” and copra plantations,
predatory and survival cannibalism, strong seafaring women, and
environmental issues and property rights from San Francisco
oyster beds to pearl diving in the Paumotos. Through its
examination of the intersections of race, class, and gender in
London’s writing,
Jack London and the Sea plumbs the often-troubled waters
of his representations of the racial Other and positions of
capitalist and colonial privilege. We can see the manifestation
of these socioeconomic hierarchies in London’s depiction of
imperialist exploitation of labor and the environment, inequities
that continue to reverberate in our current age of global
capitalism.
eBook
William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel: Gender, Genre and the Marketplace
William Clark Russell wrote more than forty nautical novels. Immensely popular in their time, his works were admired by contemporary writers, such as Conan Doyle, Stevenson and Meredith, while Swinburne, considered him 'the greatest master of the sea, living or dead'. Based on extensive archival research, Nash explores this remarkable career.
eBook
Fictions of the Sea
This timely collection brings together twelve original essays on the cultural meaning of the sea in British literature and history, from early modern times to the present. Interdisciplinary in conception, it charts metaphorical and material links between the idea of the sea in the cultural imagination and its significance for the social and political history of Britain, offering a fresh analysis of the impact of the ocean on the formation of British cultural identities. Among the cultural and literary artifacts considered are early modern legal treatises on marine boundaries, Renaissance and Romantic poetry, 19th- and 20th-century novels, popular sea songs, recent Hollywood films, as well as a diverse range of historical and critical writings. Writers discussed include Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Scott, Conrad, du Maurier, Unsworth, O'Brian, and others. All these cultural and literary 'fictions of the sea' are set in relation to wider issues relevant to maritime history and the historical experience of seafaring: problems of navigation and orientation, piracy, empire, colonialism, slavery, multi-ethnic shipboard communities, masculinity, gender relations. By combining the interests of three related but distinct areas of study-the analysis of sea fiction, critical maritime history, and cultural studies-in a focus upon the historical meaning of the sea in relation to its textual and cultural representation, Fictions of the Sea offers an original contribution to the practice of existing disciplines.
Contents: Introduction: Britain and the sea, Bernhard Klein; Who owns the sea?, James Muldoon; Orientation as a paradigm of maritime modernity, Ulrich Kinzel; Satan's ocean voyage and 18th-century seafaring trade, Anne-Julia Zwierlein; Class war and the albatross: the politics of ships as social space and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Sarah Moss; Walter Scott's The Pirate: Imperialism, nationalism and bourgeois values, Arnold Schmidt; Death by water: the theory and practice of shipwrecking, Ina Habermann; The sea is history: historicizing the Homeric sea in Victorian passages, Tobias Döring; 'As I wuz a-rolling down the highway one morn': fictions of the 19th-century English sailortown, Valerie Burton; Conrad's crews revisited, Jürgen Kramer; Cabin'd yet unconfined: heroic masculinity in English seafaring novels, Susan Bassnett; 'The sea is slavery': middle passage narratives, Carl Pedersen; Cinematographic seas: metaphors of crossing and shipwreck on the big screen (1990-2001), Patrizia A. Muscogiuri; Bibliography; Index.
eBook
The Pusher and the Sufferer
Explores the nature of Melville's relations to his reader in Moby Dick, arguing that Melville and his narrator Ishmael are so dazzled, so completely seduced by the Ahab's charismatic charm that they, along with most readers and critics, are unable to see Ahab's character clearly confusing his demonism for tragic heroism.
eBook
