Description
Book SynopsisAmong global environments, the undersea is unique in the challenges it poses and the opportunities it affords for sensation, perception, inquiry, and fantasy. The Aesthetics of the Undersea draws case studies in such potencies from the subaqueous imaginings of Western culture, and from the undersea realities that have inspired them. The chapters explore aesthetic engagements with underwater worlds, and sustain a concern with submarine sense, in several meanings of that word: when submerged, faculties and fantasies transform, confronting human subjects with their limitations while enlarging the apparent scope of possibility and invention. Terrestrially-established categories and contours shift, metamorphose, or fail altogether to apply. As ocean health acquires an increasing share of the global environmental imaginary, the histories of submarine sense manifest ever-greater importance, and offer resources for documentation as well as creativity.
The chapters deal w
Table of Contents
Introduction: Submarine Aesthetics 1. The Aesthetics of the Early Modern Grotto and the Advent of an Empirical Nature 2. The Porcellaneous Ocean: Matter and Meaning in the Rococo Undersea 3. The Logic of the Invisible: Perceiving the Submarine World in French Enlightenment Geography 4. Understanding the Loss of Colour 5. Hydromania: The Social History and Literary Significance of Romantic Swimming 6. The Great Melancholy Mother: Michelet’s Evolutionary Ocean in The Sea 7. "The Forsaken Merman," "The Little Mermaid," and Early Modernism: Undersea Imagery for the Dissociation and Dissolution of Culture 8. Encountering Living Corals: A Nineteenth-Century Scientist and Artist Reveals the Underwater Realm 9. Frank Hurley and the Symbolic Underwater 10. The Shipwreck of Reason: The Surrealist Diver and Modern Maritime Salvage 11. The Shipwreck as Undersea Gothic 12. Deep Time & Myriad Ecosystems: Urban Biotic Imaginaries and Unstable Planetary Aesthetics 13. Siren and Silent Song: Evolution and Extinction in the Submarine 14.The Ocean Hospital – a Walk around the Ward
