In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Maritime Literature

  • Introduction
  • Intra- and Inter-oceanic Connections
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Atlantic History Maritime Literature
by
Laurence Publicover, Jimmy Packham
  • LAST MODIFIED: 24 October 2024
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0412

Introduction

Maritime literature is the literature of ships and sailing, of seafaring and water-logged contention with the tempestuous elements in the midst of an ocean. The literary works most likely to come to mind are the grand voyage narratives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by writers such as Melville and Conrad—and to lesser degrees these days, Scott and Cooper—while the most significant historical points of reference include voyages of exploration and colonization, transatlantic slavery, and the long history of efforts to fathom the sea’s depths. In approaching the vast and diverse body of work that might be apprehended under the term “maritime literature,” this article foregrounds literary and scholarly work that concerns itself, above all, with the experience of being at sea: work interested, that is, in encounters with (and those enabled by) the ocean. In this way, we want to emphasize the many ways that the Atlantic Ocean is a space (or place) in its own right. Rather than conceiving the “Atlantic world” as one made up of the nations that sit on the periphery of this ocean, then, this bibliography—in the influential words of Hester Blum—“takes the sea as a proprioceptive point of inquiry” (“The Prospect of Oceanic Studies,” PMLA 125.3 (2010): 670–677 (p. 671)). Our aim here is also to indicate how literary scholarship that draws on or sits within what we might call “maritime studies”—scholarship that is concerned with literary representation of human interactions with the ocean, in particular through sea-voyages—overlaps with work in the “blue humanities”: that is, environmentally minded scholarship concerned with the seven-tenths of our planet covered by water. Such scholarship, generally presentist in focus, in that it keeps at least one eye on contemporary issues including (post)colonial histories, ocean warming and acidification, rising sea levels, and the ways in which human activities have imperiled marine life, moves well beyond literary analysis, often foregrounding historical narratives, legal questions, cultural geography, and matters of social and environmental justice; blue humanities scholarship also approaches environmental questions through visual media, as well as textual examples. Our bibliography selects works from the blue humanities—or from other emerging and adjacent fields—which has a substantial literary focus, or which has had a particular influence on literary studies. While occasionally moving into other ocean basins, the bibliography also takes the Atlantic as its center of gravity, as a result leaving out many excellent works whose focus is the (literary) cultures of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. This also means that the bibliography is mostly focused on the Anglo-American world, though it features some key works dealing with literature and oceanic culture from beyond this sphere.

General Overview

Scholarship on maritime literature has been greatly energized by an “oceanic turn” that can be dated to the first decade of the twenty-first century. While they were hardly the first to explore human-ocean interactions and literary representations of them, the essays and introductions listed in the first two sections often make a particular case for examining a part of the world that had come to be neglected in humanities scholarship (including work in the environmental humanities, whose terrestrial focus was often indicated by its use of the word “green”). Often with an environmentalist agenda, these manifestos, position pieces, and introductions to specific aspects or periods of human-ocean interactions advocate focusing on watery worlds not only as sites of connection (as had been the case for previous generations of scholars looking at, for example, Mediterranean or Atlantic history), but also as sites of human experience. Moreover, several argue for exploring human interactions with the ocean itself—and with its inhabitants.

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