Abstract
The introduction takes as its focus the book’s subtitle, ‘Cultural Responses to the Sea’, and aims to understand the relationship between culture and the sea, and to define the concept of the ‘sea narrative’ that forms this volume’s core. It begins by situating the book’s unique study of sea narratives within the field of cultural histories of the sea, discussing processes of narration, the relationship between different cultural forms, and the idea of sea narrative that is posited in the subsequent chapters. It then considers the transcultural scope of the collection and explores how the contributions work within national and transnational contexts, and draws out transnational connections that emerge across the volume as a whole.
The sea has its paths too, though water refuses to take and hold marks […] Sea roads are dissolving paths whose passage leaves no trace beyond a wake, a brief turbulence astern.
Robert Macfarlane (The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 88)
The wakes of ships and canoes that have crossed it have left no permanent mark on its waters. But if we voyaged in a New 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, looking up to the canopy of the sea’s surface above us and had a sort of time-exposure vision, we would find the tracks a closely woven tapestry of lines.
Greg Dening (‘Performing on the Beaches of the Mind: An Essay’, History and Theory, 41:1 (2002): 1–24, p. 2)
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Notes
- 1.
Philip E. Steinberg, ‘Foreword: On Thalassography’, in Jon Anderson and Kimberley Peters, eds, Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. xiii–xvii, p. xvi.
- 2.
Jon Anderson and Kimberley Peters, Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean; Tricia Cusack, ed., Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisaging the Sea as Social Space (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Mike Brown and Barbara Humberstone, eds, Seascapes: Shaped by the Sea (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); see also Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On the cultural presence of the ocean, see Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples, 8000 BC–AD 1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal and Kären Wigen, eds, Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Penguin Allen Lane, 2011); John Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2011); Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds, Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2004).
- 3.
Kären Wigen, ‘Introduction: Oceans of History’, American Historical Review, 111:3 (2006): 717–21, p. 717.
- 4.
Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, p. 10.
- 5.
Philip E. Steinberg, ‘Mediterranean Metaphors: Travel, Translation and Oceanic Imaginaries in the “New Mediterraneans” of the Arctic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean’, in Anderson and Peters, Water Worlds, pp. 23–37, p. 23.
- 6.
Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean. John R. Gillis’s The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) undertakes similar work in the context of the coast, covering 100,000 years of seaside civilisation.
- 7.
Mack, The Sea, p. 13. Likewise in David Abulafia’s The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean the interaction between human and physical geography is at the fore, focused through the Mediterranean.
- 8.
Mack, The Sea, p. 89.
- 9.
See David Lambert, Luciana Martins and Miles Ogborn, ‘Currents, Visions and Voyages: Historical Geographies of the Sea’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32:3 (2006): 479–93; this field-formative essay provides an indicative insight into the key developments and texts that have emerged in recent years.
- 10.
On travel writing of the Pacific Ocean, see for example, Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Nicholas Thomas, In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (London: Duke University Press, 1997); Paul Smethurst, Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Sea and ocean voyages are also prominent in works such as Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, eds, Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Innes M. Keighren, Charles W. J. Withers and Bill Bell, Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, eds, Voyages and Visions: Toward a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion, 1999); Tony Ballantyne, ed., Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004); and Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, eds, New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
- 11.
Margaret Cohen, The Novel and The Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Philip Edwards, Sea-Mark: The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997). See also Robert Foulke, The Sea Voyage Narrative (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002); Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John Peck, Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719–1917 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Bernhard Klein, ed., Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002).
- 12.
Cusack, Framing the Ocean, p. 16; Brady Hammond and Sean Redmond, ‘This is the Sea: Cinema at the Shoreline’, Continuum: A Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 27:5 (2013): 601–2, p. 601. On artistic representations, see also Tricia Cusack, ed., Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012); Christiana Payne, Where the Sea Meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bristol: Sansom and Co., 2007); Carl Thompson, ed., Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day (New York: Routledge, 2013); Christine Riding and Richard Johns, Turner and the Sea (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013); and Geoff Quilley, Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain 1768–1829 (New Haven: Yale University Press and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2011). On film, see also other issues in the Continuum: A Journal of Media and Cultural Studies special issue on ‘Cinema at the Shoreline’ (27:5).
- 13.
Mack, The Sea, p. 16; Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, p. 99; Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, Chap. 1.
- 14.
Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, ed. Martin Gardiner (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 56. On the ‘great void’ see Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, pp. 113–24.
- 15.
Dening, ‘Performing on the Beaches of the Mind’, p. 8; Mack, The Sea, p. 165.
- 16.
Anna Ryan, Where Land Meets Sea: Coastal Explorations of Landscape, Representation and Spatial Experience (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 7, 9.
- 17.
Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, p. 62. See also Gillis, The Human Shore, on the significance and shaping of coastal cultures.
- 18.
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ (1967), trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16:1 (1984): 22–7, p. 27. See also Gregory Votolato’s Ship (Objekt series) (London: Reaktion, 2011) which isolates the context of the ship by way of exploring the interaction between sea and land, reading the ship as an everyday object that influences the way we live; and Mack’s chapter on ‘Ships as Societies’ in The Sea, pp. 136–64.
- 19.
Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean, p. viii.
- 20.
Bentley, Bridenthal and Wigen, Seascapes, p. 12.
- 21.
Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, p. 8. See also Philip de Souza, Seafaring and Civilisation: Maritime Perspectives on World History (London: Profile, 2005).
- 22.
Cusack, Framing the Ocean, p. 3.
- 23.
Mack, The Sea, p. 20.
- 24.
See also Jerry H. Bentley, ‘Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis’, Geographical Review, 89:2 (April 1999): 215–24, which considers issues of transnational interaction posed by centring oceanic regions as focal points of study, while arguing that such an approach is richly productive for the understanding of large-scale historical processes. A transnational approach is especially evident in the field of travel writing studies, where travellers move across and between ocean zones and regions.
- 25.
Bentley, Bridenthal and Wigen, Seascapes; Cusack, Framing the Ocean; Anderson and Peters, Water Worlds; Thompson, Shipwreck in Art and Literature; Brown and Humberstone, Seascapes; Peter N. Miller, ed., The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Gillis, The Human Shore.
- 26.
Mack, The Sea, p. 82.
- 27.
Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, pp. 135–8, p. 135.
- 28.
Isaac Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 11.
- 29.
Peck, Maritime Fiction, p. 4.
- 30.
Such views are useful in shifting oceanic studies away from a heavy focus on Britain’s imperial maritime power which has predominated. Many studies cluster around the theme of imperial politics, such as David Cannadine, Empire, The Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c.1760–c.1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Miles Taylor, The Victorian Empire and Britain’s Maritime World, 1837–1901: The Sea and Global History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Peck, Maritime Fiction; H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke and John G. Reid, eds, Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c.1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Jonathan Scott, When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Other distinct oceanic regions have also been of interest in indicative studies such as Michael N. Pearson, The World of the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005); Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c.1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- 31.
Elizabeth Ho, ‘The Neo-Victorian at Sea: Towards a Global Memory of the Victorian’, in Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, eds, Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 165–78, pp. 166, 168.
- 32.
Bentley, Bridenthal and Wigen, Seascapes, p. 1.
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Mathieson, C. (2016). Introduction: The Literature, History and Culture of the Sea, 1600–Present. In: Mathieson, C. (eds) Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58116-7_1
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