Abstract
There are significant differences between British and American maritime fiction. For example, British maritime fiction is generally written from the perspective of the shore; indeed, more often than not it is land-based. American maritime fiction places more emphasis on the voyage, which is often a quest or journey of self-discovery. It is easy to suggest reasons why the two traditions differ. The British novel has a long history to call upon, and is always aware of a complex social inheritance; the nineteenth-century American novel, by contrast, is the product of, and reflection of, a country still in the process of formation. Consequently, whereas the British maritime novel dwells on family connections and social structures, the American maritime novel focuses more on isolated individuals, heroes on the edge of a new frontier. This is underlined by a different sense of space. Even when it takes place at sea, the British novel reflects a small island where people live in close proximity. The American sea novel, however, can feel boundless: the distances covered are enormous, and the time spent away from land is lengthy. British sea novels never seem to offer a similar sense of remoteness.1
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Notes
On American sea fiction, see Thomas Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961),
Bert Bender, Sea Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from ‘Moby-Dick’ to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), and
Patricia Ann Carlson (ed.), Literature and Lore of the Sea (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986).
On the broader context, see Stephen Fender, Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and
Paul Butel, The Atlantic (London: Routledge, 1999).
For a general survey of approaches to the nineteenth-century American novel, see Robert Clark, ‘American Romance’, in Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall and John Peck (eds), Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 576–88.
On the nature of maritime economies and the resemblances between Britain and America as maritime economies see Peter Padfield, Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World, 1588–1782 (London: John Murray, 1999), and
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London and New York: Verso, 1994).
On Cooper as a maritime novelist and historian, see Philbrick, op. cit., James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper (London: Methuen, 1950),
Warren S. Walker, James Fenimore Cooper: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962), and
George Dekker and John P. McWilliams, Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate (London: Macmillan, 1901).
Benjamin W. Labaree, Willam W. Fowler, Jr., Edward W. Sloan, John B. Hattendorf, Jeffrey J. Safford and Andrew W. German, America and the Sea: A Maritime History (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport, 1998), p. 6.
James Fenimore Cooper, Sea Tales: The Pilot, The Red Rover (New York: Library of America, 1991).
On Cooper’s lauding of aggressive masculinity, see Michael Davitt Bell, ‘Conditions of Literary Vocation’, in Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 2, 1820–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 25.
On the black sailor in America, see W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
James Fenimore Cooper, Afloat and Ashore (London: George Routledge, 1867).
On the divisions in America in the years before the Civil War, see Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1973).
Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (London: Penguin, 1986).
Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (New York: Paragon House, 1972), p. 261.
For a variety of critical approaches, see Richard Kopley (ed.), Poe’s ‘Pym’: Critical Explorations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992). See also the Introduction and Bibliography to the Penguin edition of the novel, op. cit.
The idea of a shadow-self is a concept that develops in the Romantic period. It appears a number of times in sea fiction. For example, it is the central idea in Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Sharer’, discussed in the final chapter of this book. See also Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology (Cambridge: Bowes, 1949).
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
For a discussion of the political implications of Carlyle’s work, see John Peck, War, the Army and Victorian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 122–4.
Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (London: Penguin, 1986). On Dana, see Bercovitch, op. cit., pp. 662–6, and
Robert L. Gale, Richard Henry Dana (New York: Twayne, 1969).
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© 2001 John Peck
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Peck, J. (2001). American Sea Fiction: Cooper, Poe, Dana. In: Maritime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985212_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985212_6
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