Shipwreck In Art And Literature

Tales of shipwreck have always fascinated audiences, and as a result there is a rich literature of suffering at sea, and an equally rich tradition of visual art depicting this theme. Exploring the shifting semiotics and symbolism of shipwreck, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume provide a history of a major literary and artistic motif as they consider how depictions have varied over time, and across genres and cultures. Simultaneously, they explore the imaginative potential of shipwreck as they consider the many meanings that have historically attached to maritime disaster and suffering at sea. Spanning both popular and high culture, and addressing a range of political, spiritual, aesthetic and environmental concerns, this cross-cultural, comparative study sheds new light on changing attitudes to the sea, especially in the West. In particular, it foregrounds the role played by the maritime in the emergence of Western modernity, and so will appeal not only to those interested in literature and art, but also to scholars in history, geography, international relations, and postcolonial studies.

The motifs of island and shipwreck have been present in literature and the arts from ancient times. The essays in this volume explore shipwreck and island figures together in literary texts, films, Reality TV, music, and art.

This innovative study is the first to analyze systematically an important category of Netherlandish seascape--the storm at sea. It addresses the fundamental issues of meaning and purpose that such pictures pose for students of Dutch landscape and, indeed, of all Dutch realism. Bringing together a vast body of imagery and texts never before assembled, Goedde places this imagery within historical and cultural contexts that permit us to enter into the ideas, values, and metaphorical associations that such pictures held for seventeenth-century viewers. He amplifies this iconographic study with a meticulous and subtle analysis of narrative incident and expressive form that, while respecting the naturalism of the art, reveals its surprisingly conventional and rhetorical character. In particular Goedde links the meaning of Dutch tempest paintings with a rhetorical tradition in Dutch literature. Through his analysis he is able to offer fresh insights not only into these seascapes but into the interpretation of all pre-Romantic landscapes as well. This book is addressed at once to specialists in Dutch art and to a broad group of art historians and scholars concerned with cultural history and the relation of literature to art. It offers a survey of the tempest in art and literature from antiquity to the modern era in order to define the conventional elements of Dutch painting and writing on this theme. An exceptional feature of this study is the author's analysis of the ways conventions encode meaning in both literary and pictorial representations. Explicating these conventional structures and themes in terms of the cosmology of correspondences and of elemental love and strife, Goedde's discussion both encourages and controls metaphorical interpretation of stormscapes. This study also offers an essential historical background to anyone concerned with the picturesque, sublimity, and Romanticism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture because of the importance of the themes of storm and shipwreck in the later period.

A classic tale of seafaring, shipwreck, and survival, reprinted from Wesleyan University Press's 1978 facsimile of the original. When artist, illustrator, writer, and adventurer Rockwell Kent first published N by E in a limited edition in 1930, his account of a voyage on a 33-foot cutter from New York Harbor to the rugged shores of Greenland quickly became a collectors' item. Little wonder, for readers are immediately drawn to Kent's vivid descriptions of the experience; we share "the feeling of wind and wet and cold, of lifting seas and steep descents, of rolling over as the wind gusts hit," and the sound "of wind in the shrouds, of hard spray flung on a drum-tight canvas, of rushing water at the scuppers, of the gale shearing a tormented sea." When the ship sinks in a storm-swept fjord within 50 miles of its destination, the story turns to the stranding and subsequent rescue of the three-man crew, salvage of the vessel, and life among native Greenlanders. Magnificently illustrated by Kent's wood-block prints and narrated in his poetic and highly entertaining style, this tale of the perils of killer nor'easters, treacherous icebergs, and impenetrable fog—and the joys of sperm whales breaching or dawn unmasking a longed-for landfall—is a rare treat for old salts and landlubbers alike.

This innovative study is the first to analyze systematically an important category of Netherlandish seascape--the storm at sea. It addresses the fundamental issues of meaning and purpose that such pictures pose for students of Dutch landscape and, indeed, of all Dutch realism. Bringing together a vast body of imagery and texts never before assembled, Goedde places this imagery within historical and cultural contexts that permit us to enter into the ideas, values, and metaphorical associations that such pictures held for seventeenth-century viewers. He amplifies this iconographic study with a meticulous and subtle analysis of narrative incident and expressive form that, while respecting the naturalism of the art, reveals its surprisingly conventional and rhetorical character. In particular Goedde links the meaning of Dutch tempest paintings with a rhetorical tradition in Dutch literature. Through his analysis he is able to offer fresh insights not only into these seascapes but into the interpretation of all pre-Romantic landscapes as well. This book is addressed at once to specialists in Dutch art and to a broad group of art historians and scholars concerned with cultural history and the relation of literature to art. It offers a survey of the tempest in art and literature from antiquity to the modern era in order to define the conventional elements of Dutch painting and writing on this theme. An exceptional feature of this study is the author's analysis of the ways conventions encode meaning in both literary and pictorial representations. Explicating these conventional structures and themes in terms of the cosmology of correspondences and of elemental love and strife, Goedde's discussion both encourages and controls metaphorical interpretation of stormscapes. This study also offers an essential historical background to anyone concerned with the picturesque, sublimity, and Romanticism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture because of the importance of the themes of storm and shipwreck in the later period.

Explores how early modern Europeans responded to suffering and asks how they both described and practised compassion.

Shipwreck Narratives: Out of Our Depth studies both the representation of shipwreck and the ways in which shipwrecks are used in creative, philosophical, and political works. The first part of the book examines historical shipwreck narratives published over a period of two centuries and their legacies. Michael Titlestad points to a range of narrative conventions, literary tropes and questions concerning representation and its limits in narratives about these historic shipwrecks. The second part engages novels, poems, films, artwork, and musical composition that grapple with shipwreck. Collectively the chapters suggest the spectacular productivity of shipwreck narrative; the multiple ways in which its concerns and logic have inspired anxious creativity in the last century. Titlestad recognizes in weaving in his personal experience that shipwreck-the destruction of form and the advent of disorder-could be seen not only as a corollary for his own neurological disorder, but also an abiding principle in tropology. This book describes how shipwreck has figured in texts (from historical narratives to fiction, film and music) as an analogue for emotional, psychological, and physical fragmentation. Michael Titlestad is Personal Professor in the Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has published widely in the fields of South African literature, apocalypticism, whiteness and jazz. He is the author of Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage and is the co-editor (with David Watson) of The Ongoing End: The Limits of Apocalyptic Narrative. He is also the editor of English Studies in Africa, the most widely read literary studies journal in South Africa. .

Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea is a work of social history examining community relationships, law, and seafaring over the long early modern period. It explores the politics of the coastline, the economy of scavenging, and the law of 'wreck of the sea' from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I to the end of the reign of George II. England's coastlines were heavily trafficked by naval and commercial shipping, but an unfortunate percentage was cast away or lost. Shipwrecks were disasters for merchants and mariners, but opportunities for shore dwellers. As the proverb said, it was an ill wind that blew nobody any good. Lords of manors, local officials, officers of the Admiralty, and coastal commoners competed for maritime cargoes and the windfall of wreckage, which they regarded as providential godsends or entitlements by right. A varied haul of commodities, wines, furnishings, and bullion came ashore, much of it claimed by the crown. The people engaged in salvaging these wrecks came to be called 'wreckers', and gained a reputation as violent and barbarous plunderers. Close attention to statements of witnesses and reports of survivors shows this image to be largely undeserved. Dramatic evidence from previously unexplored manuscript sources reveals coastal communities in action, collaborating as well as competing, as they harvested the bounty of the sea.