Description
Book SynopsisThe essays collected within this volume ask how literary practices are shaped by the experience of being at sea—and also how they
forge that experience. Individual chapters explore the literary worlds of naval ships, whalers, commercial vessels, emigrant ships, and troop transports from the seventeenth to the twentieth-first century, revealing a rich history of shipboard reading, writing, and performing. Contributors are interested both in how literary activities adapt to the maritime world, and in how individual and collective shipboard experiences are structured through—and framed by—such activities. In this respect, the volume builds on scholarship that has explored reading as a spatially situated and embodied practice. As our contributors demonstrate, the shipboard environment and the ocean beyond it place the mind and body under peculiar forms of pressure, and these determine acts of reading—and of writing and performing—in specific ways.
Trade Review“I found every one of the ten chapters … absolutely fascinating. A real strength of the collection is its coherence. The extent of cross-referencing across the chapters indicates a particularly careful editing process, and helps the main themes to emerge more strongly from the book as a whole. Shipboard Literary Cultures is a formidable work of collaborative scholarship and will be of great interest to scholars across all areas of maritime studies and book history.” (Faye Hammill, The Mariner's Mirror, April 28, 2023)
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Stephen R. Berry (Associate Professor of History, Simmons College, US), “The Sailing Ship as a School of Virtue”.- Chapter 2: Christian Algar (Curator, Printed Heritage Collections, British Library), “Books with
Providence: The Power and Influence of a Puritan Naval Chaplain’s Library at Sea”.- Chapter 3: Tamsin Badcoe (Lecturer in English, University of Bristol, UK), “Writing the Cabin as Cloister in the Diary of Sister Mary Paul Mulquin”.- Chapter 4: Jimmy Packham (Lecturer in North American Literature, University of Birmingham, UK): “The Maritime Self on the American Whaleship”.-
Chapter 5: Laurence Publicover (Senior Lecturer in English, University of Bristol, UK) and Eli Cumings (Postgraduate Researcher, University of Cambridge), “Shipboard Diaries as Navigational Instruments”.- Chapter 6: Helen Chambers (Research Associate, The Open University, UK), “The
Torrens as a space of writing, reading, and performance”.-
Chapter 7: Mary Isbell (Assistant Professor of English, University of New Haven, US), “Recognition and Anonymity: Shipboard Theatricals and Newspapers aboard USS
Macedonian”.- Chapter 8: Susann Liebich (Postdoctoral Fellow in History, Heidelberg University, Germany), “Identity and Community in New Zealand Troopship Magazines of the First World War”.- Chapter 9: Tamson Pietsch (Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia), “The laboratory method made mobile: learning aboard the 1926-27 Floating University”.- Chapter 10: David Punter (Professor of English, University of Bristol, UK), “Down to the Sea in Ships”.- Afterword: Hester Blum (Associate Professor of English, Penn State University, USA).
