Abstract
The ocean liner—defined here as a transatlantic express passenger steamship in circulation from the 1840s as a mail carrier to its near-extinction in the 1960s in favor of airplanes and container ships—matured both as a physical object and as a cultural construction during the period of literary modernism. These ships attracted a great deal of attention from journalists, architects, artists, designers, and writers, whose bevy of verbal and visual texts constituted a recognizable discourse around crossing and cruising. The resulting archive has been examined by historians, famously by maritime historians Walter Lord and John Maxtone-Graham, but, more recently, by social and architectural historians.1 Yet the ocean liner has not been thoroughly investigated as a discursive phenomenon. Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris’s interdisciplinary collection, Modernism on Sea (2009), focuses on seaside style, while Cesare Casarino’s Modernity at Sea (2002) addresses sailing vessels.2 And at present, the burgeoning field of oceanic studies focuses on periods well before modernism.3 Yet humanists would be amply rewarded by considering the incredible cultural currency enjoyed by liners and cruise ships. Liners popularized avant-garde aesthetics, including Art Nouveau (the France), minimalism (the Île de France), and Art Deco (the Normandie), while the Aquitania crucially influenced Le Corbusier.
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Notes
See Lorraine Coons and Alexander Varias, Tourist Third Cabin: Steamship Travel in the Interwar Years (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003);
Douglas Hart, “Sociability and ‘Separate Spheres’ on the North Atlantic: The Interior of British Atlantic Liners, 1840–1930,” Journal of Social History 44.1 (2010): 189–212;
Peter Quatermaine and Bruce Peter, Identity, Design, and Culture (New York: Rizzoli, 2006);
Mark Rennella and Whitney Walton, “Planned Serendipity: American Travelers and the Transatlantic Voyage in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Social History 38.2 (2004): 365–383; and
Anne Wealleans, Designing Liners: A History of Interior Design Afloat (London: Routledge, 2006).
See Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and
Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris, eds., Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009).
See Joseph Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters, ed. Ford Madox Ford (New York: Doubleday, 1924), 214.
See Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2008); and
Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., Geographies of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2005). In such works, the space theory of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certeau tend to underwrite the discussion.
Franco Moretti, The Atlas of the European Novel (London: Verso, 1998), 3.
For a lengthier accounts of ANT, refer to John Law and John Hassard’s Actor Network Theory and After (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999). For an account of ANT’s larger context in academia and philosophy, see Steven C. Ward, Reconfiguring Truth: Postmodernism, Science Studies, and the Search for a New Model of Knowledge (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).
Graham Harman, Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), 11.
See Mark Morrisson, “Why Modernist Studies and Science Studies Need Each Other,” Modernism/modernity 9.4 (2002): 675–682; and
Lisa Tickner, “The Popular Culture of Kermesse: Lewis, Painting, and Performance, 1912–1913,” Modernism/modernity 4.2 (1997): 67–120.
Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism),” Modernism/modernity 6.2 (1999): 1.
Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation,” Common Knowledge 3.2 (1994), 64.
Latour, “A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans: Following Daedelus’s Labyrinth,” in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 174–215.
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1999), 251.
Waugh, When the Going Was Good (London: Duckworth, 1946), 20–21.
Waugh, The Complete Short Stories (New York: Everyman, 2000), 114.
For more on the troubled distinction between travel and tourism, see Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
Waugh, A Handful of Dust (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1999), 228.
For more on Waugh’s mid-1950s career crisis, see James J. Lynch, “Evelyn Waugh During the Pinfold Years,” Modern Fiction Studies 32.4 (1986), 542–560.
See Waugh, The Letters Of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (New Haven, CT: Ticknor and Fields, 1980), 417.
Qtd. in Douglas Lane Patey, The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 323.
For more information about Waugh’s eventful cruise, see Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 562–567; Patey, The Life of Evelyn Waugh, 325–326; and
Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years (London: Norton, 1992), 342–347.
Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (New York: Penguin, 1962), 348, 339.
James J. Lynch, “Evelyn Waugh during the Pinfold Years,” Modern Fiction Studies 32.4 (1986): 543.
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© 2014 Robert T. Tally Jr.
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Ross, S. (2014). “History, Mystery, Leisure, Pleasure”: Evelyn Waugh, Bruno Latour, and the Ocean Liner. In: Tally, R.T. (eds) Literary Cartographies. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137449375_8
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