Abstract
This chapter summarizes some important tropes in American sea literature by the sea. Narrators by the sea are often obsessed with both physical and metaphorical features of the “edge” of the ocean. The multifaceted physicality of the shore is replete with narrators’ observations on the beach; on the other hand, the physicality transcends into some abstract notions and images. A notable example would be Henry David Thoreau and his Cape Cod (1865), in which he observes the nineteenth-century American beach experiences, but Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Rachel Carson, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Henry Beston, and some twentieth-century surf writings will also be introduced to show how the space between the terrestrial and the oceanic is expressed in this subgenre, while analyzing how both sides of oceanic edge become transient and interactive, but never lose their inherent essence.
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Notes
A notable example would be Carl Schmitt, a German philosopher and political theorist who wrote Land and Sea, trans. Simona Draghici (Plutarch Press, 1997; original publication 1954).
Schmitts Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George D. Schwab (MIT Press, 1985) would be another example adapted intro political theory and territorial sovereignty.
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. Ed. Albert E. Stone. New York: Penguin, 1981. (50). Print.
Thomas Philbrick. St. John de Crèvecoeur. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970. (44). Print.
Franklin, T. Bedford. A History of Agriculture. London: G. Bell, 1948. (295–296). Print.
Marcus Rediker. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. (296). Print.
Leo Marx. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. (116). Print.
Henry David Thoreau. Waiden, and Other Writings. Ed. William Howarth. New York: Modern Library, 1981. (979). Print.
John Lowney. “Thoreau’s Cape Cod: The Unsettling Art of the Wrecker.” American Literature 64.2 (1992): 239–254. (243).
Robert Richardson, Jr. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. (202). Print.
See Especially Maine: The Natural World of Henry Beston from Cape Cod to the St. Lawrence. Ed. Elizabeth Coatsworth. Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Greene Press, 1970. (2). Print.
Henry Beston. The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. New York: Penguin, 1928. (1). Print.
Allan D. Burns. “The Art and Legacy of Henry Bestons The Outermost House.” Concord Saunterer 1999; 7: 236–251.
Paul Brooks. The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work. Boston: G.K. Hall & Company, 1997. 101. Print.
Mary A. McCay, Rachel Carson. NY: Twayne Publishers, 1993. (46). Print.
Bree B. Mattson. Interconnections: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Emergence of Ecofeminism. Sarah Lawrence College, 2008.
Magee, Richard Michael. “Sentimental Ecology: Susan Fenimore Cooper and a New Model of Ecocriticism.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 63.8 (2003): 2873.
Carol B. Gartner. Rachel Carson. New York: Ungar Pub. Co., 1983. (43).
Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Gift from the Sea. New York Pantheon, 1955. (9). Print.
Kasia Boddy. “The Modern Beach.” Critical Quarterly 49.4 (2007): 21–39. (22). Print.
Michelle Elleray. “Crossing the Beach: A Victorian Tale Adrift in the Pacific.” Victorian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Social, Political, and Cultural Studies 47.2 (2005): 164–173.
Matt Warshaw. The History of Surfing. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2010. (94–151). Print.
The most recent and in-depth study of surfing culture is done by Krista Comer’s Surfer Girls in the New World Order (Duke University Press, 2010), which uses surfer girls as a case study to illustrate more complicated relationships between local subcultures and globalism, in addition to insightful analyses on feminism, politics, and environmentalism.
John Fiske. “Surfalism and Sandiotics: The Beach in Oz Culture Surfalism.” Australian Journal of Cultural Studies 1:2 (1983): 120–149. (145–146),
Steven Kotler. West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. (3). Print.
There are surf writing anthologies that help us understand how surf culture has been an integral part of western culture, and about the West’s colonial relations with the Pacific islands. See Paper Shredders: An Anthology of Surf Writing (Ed. Murray G. Thomas and Gary Wright, New York: iUniverse, Inc. 1993),
Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing (Ed. Moser, Patrick, Manoa: University of Hawaii Press, 2008),
Zero Break: A Collection of Surf Writing 1777–2004. (Ed. Matt Warshaw, New York: Mariner Books, 2004).
Steven Kotler. West of Jesus: Surfing Science and the Origins of Belief. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. (3–4). Print.
Daniel Duane. Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast. New York: North Point Press, 1996. (5). Print.
Allan C. Weisbercker. In Search of Captain Zero. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2001. (7). Print.
For a discussion about Waiden, particularly about its reference to marine nature, and maritime culture, see Haskell S. Springer’s “The Nautical Waiden” in The New England Quarterly 57.1 (March 1984): 84–97 and Leila Hatch’s “Castles of Sand: Thoreau on the Seashore” in http://thoreau.eserver.org/shore.html.
Peter Benchley. Jaws. New York: Doubleday, 1974. (5). Print.
William Wood. New England’s Prospect. 1634. Ed. Alden T. Vaughan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. (54–55). Print.
Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner’s, 1952. (107–108). Print.
James Dickey. James Dickey: Poems 1957–1967. Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 1967. (13–15). Print.
Bill McKibben. The End of Nature. New York: Anchor Books, 1989. (8). Print.
Sylvia A. Earle. Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995. (189). Print.
Carl Safina. Song for the Blue Ocean. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1999. (401). Print.
Peter Benchley. Ocean Planet: Writings and Images of the Sea. New York: Harry N Abrams, 1995. (138). Print.
(qtd. in Lencek and Bosker xxi). Lenček, Lena and et al. The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth. New York, N.Y.: Viking, 1998. Print.
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© 2014 Shin Yamashiro
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Yamashiro, S. (2014). American Sea Literature—by the Sea. In: American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463302_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463302_3
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