The Victorian Novel And The Problems Of Marine Language

This book shows how prose writers in the Victorian period grappled with the sea as a setting, a shaper of plot and character, as a structuring motif, and as a source of metaphor.

To write about the sea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to do so against a vast accretion of past deeds, patterns of thought, and particularly modes of expression, many of which had begun to feel not just settled but exhausted. All at Sea takes up this circumstance, showing how prose writers in this period grappled with the super-conventionalized nature of the sea as a setting, as a shaper of plot and character, as a structuring motif, and as a source of metaphor. But while writing about the sea required careful negotiation of multiple and sometimes conflicting associations, the sea's multiplicity and freight function not just as impediments to thought or expression but as sources of intellectual and expressive possibilities. The book examines a provocatively diverse group of key authors spanning from the 1830s to the 1930s. The discussion treats both writers inextricably associated with the sea (Frederick Marryat, Joseph Conrad) and those whose works are less obviously marine, such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Virginia Woolf. What these writers share, among other things, is that they simultaneously register and turn to account the difficulties that attend writing about, and writing with, the sea. In the process, their sea-writing sheds new light on the value of marginalized representational techniques including repetition, cliché, and imprecision.

In this important new study, John Peck examines the cultural significance of maritime novels from Defoe through to Conrad. Focusing in particular on the image of the body, he illustrates how these works are built around the disparity between the masculine and often brutal regime of the ship and the civilised values of those who remain on the shore. The first comprehensive discussion of its subject, Maritime Fiction is an original exploration of the relationship between national identity, fiction and the sea.

A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick’s enlightening and entertaining tour through Melville’s classic. As he did in his National Book Award–winning bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick brings a sailor’s eye and an adventurer’s passion to unfolding the story behind an epic American journey. He skillfully navigates Melville’s world and illuminates the book’s humor and unforgettable characters—finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and, indeed, to all times. An ideal match between author and subject, Why Read Moby-Dick? will start conversations, inspire arguments, and make a powerful case that this classic tale waits to be discovered anew. “Gracefully written [with an] infectious enthusiasm…”—New York Times Book Review