Search results for ""author margaret cohen""

This volume covers a period when Europeans were making great advances in the production and application of pure knowledge, especially in the fields of navigation and discovery. Thus European powers gained empires around the globe and the benefits that came with them, while the rest of the world had to be content with supplying the raw material (i.e labour, bullion, wood, plants, ore) of these good things. This would not have been possible without navies and trading monopolies, enterprises in which the freedom of the seas was disputed, then gained or lost. The essays in this volume range between three eras in the age of discovery: first, the excitement of seeing something for the first time; second, the experience of understanding the importance of the new thing; and third, the disillusion incident to reframing the prehistory of humanity and its destiny without the usual signposts of an anthropocentric journey from innocence to salvation via sin, atonement and judgment. The maritime contribution to all three eras was enormous not simply because it provided a mobile platform for the inspection of the new but because it proved experimentally that there were no extremes of heroic virtue or of brutal depravity to which humans might not tend when necessity or wantonness called for them. Usually the evil side of humanity was assigned to `savages’ but in the curiously singular person of the pirate, a mirror-image can be found of everyone – really, all people who lived on or by the sea were pirates of a sort. Commencing as an age of rational certainties, the Enlightenment gave way to the opposite. The symmetries of the Linnaean system yielded to the endless process of mutation Buffon called speciation. Rational government of the passions was succeeded by the cult of sensibility and spontaneous emotion. The mathematical exactness of Cartesian knowledge was supplanted by imagination. Sailors returned with pictures of mirages never seen before, the products of Nature’s own imagination that posed a question posed again here: `No doubt they are real, but are they true?’

Read more less

The nineteenth-century French novel has long been seen as the heroic production of great men, who confronted in their works the social consequences of the French Revolution. And it is true that French realism, especially as developed by Balzac and Stendhal, was one of the most influential novelistic forms ever invented. Margaret Cohen, however, challenges the traditional account of the genesis of realism by returning Balzac and Stendhal to the forgotten novelistic contexts of their time. Reconstructing a key formative period for the novel, she shows how realist codes emerged in a "hostile take-over" of a prestigious contemporary sentimental practice of the novel, which was almost completely dominated by women writers. Cohen draws on impressive archival research, resurrecting scores of forgotten nineteenth-century novels, to demonstrate that the codes most closely identified with realism were actually the invention of sentimentality, a powerful aesthetic of emerging liberal-democratic society, although Balzac and Stendhal trivialized sentimental works by associating them with "frivolous" women writers and readers. Attention to these gendered struggles over genre explains why women were not pioneers of realism in France during the nineteenth century, a situation that contrasts with England, where women writers played a formative role in inventing the modern realist novel. Cohen argues that to understand how literary codes respond to material factors, it is imperative to see how such factors take shape within the literary field as well as within society as a whole. The book also proposes that attention to literature as a social institution will help critics resolve the current, vital question of how to practice literary history in the wake of poststructuralism.

Read more less

The sea is omnipresent in the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean basin. It is an inexhaustible source of food, but also a well-traveled roadway and a means to communicate, trade with, or wage war against one’s neighbors. Perhaps because these practical meanings of the sea were so deeply embedded in daily life, the sea also had a profound religious and symbolic significance for ancient people, from the worship of sea-deities by anxious mariners to the creation of intricate literary devices based on ‘the wine-dark sea’ and concepts such as insularity. People even imagined that, at the edge of the world, where the ocean meets the sky, was the entrance to the Underworld as well as to Olympus, the realm of the gods. In between these distant mythical shores and the well-known contours of the Mediterranean was a space where all utopias and dystopias could be projected—a space to discover and rediscover endlessly. This volume addresses the constant interplay between the real and the imaginary significance of the sea in ancient thought, from philosophy and science to shipbuilding, trade routes, military technology, poetry, mythmaking, and iconography. The volume spans a period of almost two millennia and an area that covers Spain to India and China, and West Africa to the British Isles, demonstrating the global interconnection of cultures and trade, conceived in its broadest possible sense, in the ancient world.

Read more less

The cultural history of the sea during the Middle Ages is a young and dynamic field. Born only recently in the literary criticism of European sources, this innovative volume pushes out beyond this European heartland to explore the shape and potential of a cultural history of the sea constructed also from global literatures and oral traditions, and from material things. The chapters in this volume bring together the perspectives and expertise of archaeologists, historians and literary historians with a core focus on Afro-Eurasia and its encircling seas. Topics explored include: the evolving visual representation of the seas in Europe, the Islamic world and the Far East; the development of navigation technologies in the seas around Afro-Eurasia; imaginative projections of the sea in cultures ranging from Maori Aotearoa to Europe; a history of maritime and riverine trade networks across medieval Afro-Eurasia and two novel comparative studies, of islands and shores in Mediterranean and Indian Ocean history, and of the archaeology of fishing and fish eating in the North Atlantic and Swahili worlds. This volume does not pretend to offer a definitive answer to how a more global cultural history of the sea should be written; it offers not ‘The’ but ‘A’ Cultural History of the Sea for the period between 800 and 1450 CE, shaped as much by the parameters of the series itself as by the vision, curiosity and expertise of its editor and individual contributors. In so doing this volume hopes to open fresh dialogues amongst cultural historians of the sea and bring new ideas and questions to the greater numbers of non-specialists just now venturing into this field.

Read more less

For the first time during the Early Modern period, ships regularly traveled between and among all of basins that comprise the World Ocean. During this period European mariners ventured into new waters, where they encountered new trading partners, new environments, and new opportunities. In the Caribbean and Atlantic coast of the Americas, European mariners sought everything from pearls to gold to codfish, and in pursuing these resources they fractured Indigenous communities. Entering into the ancient monsoon routes of the Indian Ocean brought European ships in touch with the powerful states and maritime cultures of East Africa and Asia. Converging on the vast Pacific basin both from the Americas and from Asia brought these mariners into contact with ancient cultures, dangerous passages, and newly global trade routes. During this period of globalization and cultural encounters, the ocean provided a means of transportation, a site of environmental hostility, and a poetic metaphor for both connection and alienation. In material and cultural ways, the global sea-routes traveled during this period laid down structures of global exchange and conflict that the world still follows today

Read more less

Across the 19th century, maritime globalization expanded at a hitherto unimaginable pace, transforming transport and communications over the seas into oceanic networks at a planetary scale. These networks shaped culture in its most expansive sense, affecting seafaring, warfare, empire, commerce, communications, passenger travel, leisure and science. Authors recover the sea experience of people and groups entangled with and yet neglected in an earlier generation of maritime history focused on conquest, empire, and knowledge. Thus, across a century when Britannia nominally ruled the waves, military control emerges as both opportunistic, harboring slavers, as well as partial, giving agency to mutineers and enslaved crew members, including on the Royal Navy’s own fleet; the wreck of Arctic exploring voyages such as the Erebus and the Terror takes readers to PanInuit exploration over sea ice around the Arctic circle; colonial and mercantile transport in the Indian Ocean reveals the role of lascars, the seafarers of color who for centuries had practiced these waters; on the coasts of industrial nations, the professional establishment of marine sciences depends on the pathbreaking contributions of female amateur naturalists. As part of its revisionary aim, this volume gives voice to the physical environment. Thus, we discover contrasting perspectives about this environment under threat today of European mariners for whom it was deadly and treacherous, and for maritime Aborigines who lived in its shelter. Considering literature and art as well as history, authors further trace how the paradoxes of sea practice shape some of the most memorable ocean fantasies of the Western tradition, fostering both a celebration of work and technology, and a preservation of secular magic in a disenchanted world.

Read more less

For a century, the history of the novel has been written in terms of nations and territories: the English novel, the French novel, the American novel. But what if novels were viewed in terms of the seas that unite these different lands? Examining works across two centuries, The Novel and the Sea recounts the novel's rise, told from the perspective of the ship's deck and the allure of the oceans in the modern cultural imagination. Margaret Cohen moors the novel to overseas exploration and work at sea, framing its emergence as a transatlantic history, steeped in the adventures and risks of the maritime frontier. Cohen explores how Robinson Crusoe competed with the best-selling nautical literature of the time by dramatizing remarkable conditions, from the wonders of unknown lands to storms, shipwrecks, and pirates. She considers James Fenimore Cooper's refashioning of the adventure novel in postcolonial America, and a change in literary poetics toward new frontiers and to the maritime labor and technology of the nineteenth century. Cohen shows how Jules Verne reworked adventures at sea into science fiction; how Melville, Hugo, and Conrad navigated the foggy waters of language and thought; and how detective and spy fiction built on sea fiction's problem-solving devices. She also discusses the transformation of the ocean from a theater of skilled work to an environment of pristine nature and the sublime. A significant literary history, The Novel and the Sea challenges readers to rethink their land-locked assumptions about the novel.

Read more less

A rich history of underwater filmmaking and how it has profoundly influenced the aesthetics of movies and public perception of the oceansIn The Underwater Eye, Margaret Cohen tells the fascinating story of how the development of modern diving equipment and movie camera technology has allowed documentary and narrative filmmakers to take human vision into the depths, creating new imagery of the seas and the underwater realm, and expanding the scope of popular imagination. Innovating on the most challenging film set on earth, filmmakers have tapped the emotional power of the underwater environment to forge new visions of horror, tragedy, adventure, beauty, and surrealism, entertaining the public and shaping its perception of ocean reality.Examining works by filmmakers ranging from J. E. Williamson, inventor of the first undersea film technology in 1914, to Wes Anderson, who filmed the underwater scenes of his 2004 The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou entirely in a pool, The Underwater Eye traces how the radically alien qualities of underwater optics have shaped liquid fantasies for more than a century. Richly illustrated, the book explores documentaries by Jacques Cousteau, Louis Malle, and Hans Hass, art films by Man Ray and Jean Vigo, and popular movies and television shows such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Sea Hunt, the Bond films, Jaws, The Abyss, and Titanic. In exploring the cultural impact of underwater filmmaking, the book also asks compelling questions about the role film plays in engaging the public with the remote ocean, a frontline of climate change.

Read more less

The Literary Channel defines a crucial transnational literary "zone" that shaped the development of the modern novel. During the first two centuries of the genre's history, Britain and France were locked in political, economic, and military struggle. The period also saw British and French writers, critics, and readers enthusiastically exchanging works, codes, and theories of the novel. Building on both nationally based literary history and comparatist work on poetics, this book rethinks the genre's evolution as marking the power and limits of modern cultural nationalism. In the Channel zone, the novel developed through interactions among texts, readers, writers, and translators that inextricably linked national literary cultures. It served as a forum to promote and critique nationalist cliches, whether from the standpoint of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the insurgent nationalism of colonized spaces, or the non-nationalized culture of consumption. In the process, the Channel zone promoted codes that became the genre's hallmarks, including the sentimental poetics that would shape fiction through the nineteenth century. Uniting leading critics who bridge literary history and theory, The Literary Channel will appeal to all readers attentive to the future of literary studies, as well as those interested in the novel's development, British and French cultural history, and extra-national patterns of cultural exchange. Contributors include April Alliston, Emily Apter, Margaret Cohen, Joan DeJean, Carolyn Dever, Lynn Festa, Francoise Lionnet, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Sharon Marcus, Richard Maxwell, and Mary Helen McMurran.

Read more less

In 1972 an image became an icon: ‘Blue Marble’, a photograph of the Earth as seen from outer space. The picture features prominently the globe’s water-covered surface. The ocean connects nature and culture in the modern world. Within the time-span of 100 years, the sea changed its cultural meaning, from a dangerous place to an endangered environment. This volume traces diverse processes of oceanic transformation in the Anthropocene: it follows scientists, seafarers, diplomats and filmmakers from ship-decks to the arenas of political decision making on land. The essays lead from underwater dumping grounds to islands in the south pacific. Tiny organisms like plankton and charismatic megafauna like whales accompanied the human voyages. The presence of the animals challenges common notions of human culture. The global age has to take non-human agents into account to fully understand the cultural history of the seas.

Read more less

Despite rumours of its demise in literary theory and practice, realism persists. Why this is, and how realism is relevant to current interdisciplinary debates in gender studies and cultural studies, are the questions underlying this work.

Read more less

Among 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 with the sensory, material, and formal provocations of the underwater environment, and consider the consequences of such provocations for aesthetic and epistemological paradigms. Contributors, who hail from the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, include scholars of literature, art, new media, music and history. Cases studies range from baroque and rococo fantasies to the gothic, surrealism, modernism, and contemporary installation art. By juxtaposing early modern and Enlightenment contexts with matters of more recent – and indeed contemporary – importance, The Aesthetics of the Undersea establishes crucial relations among temporally remote entities, which will resonate across the environmental humanities.

Read more less

Doing Things Differently celebrates the work of Donald Meltzer, who was such a lively force in the training of child psychotherapists at the Tavistock Clinic for many years. The book represents the harvest of Meltzer's thinking and teaching, and covers such topics as dimensionality in primitive states of mind, dreaming, supervision, and the claustrum.

Read more less

Margaret Cohen’s careful editorial revision modernizes and renews Flaubert’s stylistic masterpiece. In addition, Cohen has added to the Second Edition a new introduction, substantially new annotations, and twenty-one striking images, including photographs and engravings, that inform students’ understanding of middle-class life in nineteenth-century provincial France. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert created a cogent counter discourse that exposed and resisted the dominant intellectual and social ideologies of his age. The novel’s subversion of conventional moral norms inevitably created controversy and eventually led to Flaubert’s prosecution by the French government on charges of offending "public and religious morality." This Norton edition is the only one available that includes the complete manuscript from Flaubert’s 1857 trial. "Criticism" includes sixteen studies regarding the novel’s central themes, twelve of them new to the Second Edition, including essays by Charles Baudelaire, Henry James, Roland Barthes, Jonathan Culler, and Naomi Schor. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Read more less