The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives

by Hester Blum

Overview

With long, solitary periods at sea, far from literary and cultural centers, sailors comprise a remarkable population of readers and writers. Although their contributions have been little recognized in literary history, seamen were important figures in the nineteenth-century American literary sphere. In the first book to explore their unique contribution to literary culture, Hester Blum examines the first-person narratives of working sailors, from little-known sea tales to more famous works by Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Henry Dana.

In their narratives, sailors wrote about how their working lives coexisted with--indeed, mutually drove--their imaginative lives. Even at leisure, they were always on the job site. Blum analyzes seamen's libraries, Barbary captivity narratives, naval memoirs, writings about the Galapagos Islands, Melville's sea vision, and the crisis of death and burial at sea. She argues that the extent of sailors' literacy and the range of their reading were unusual for a laboring class, belying the popular image of Jack Tar as merely a swaggering, profane, or marginal figure. As Blum demonstrates, seamen's narratives propose a method for aligning labor and contemplation that has broader applications for the study of American literature and history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469606552
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	09/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Hester Blum is associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. The Sea Narrative and Sailors' Literary Culture
Chapter 1. The Literati of the Galley
Chapter 2. Barbary Captivity and Intra-Atlantic Print Culture
Chapter 3. Naval Memoirs and the Literary Marketplace
Part II. Maritime Epistemology and Crisis
Chapter 4. The Sea Eye
Chapter 5. The Galapagos and the Evolution of the Maritime Imagination
Chapter 6. From Preface to Postscript: Death and Burial at Sea
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Blum the rise of the sea narrative as a popular and nationalist literary form but also investigates the reading and writing practices of sailors themselves. Her attention to sailors' 'cultures of letters,' especially to issues of literacy, reading practices, and book making, is particularly valuable. This is an impressive, substantial, well-written book that engages a wide range of criticism and makes an important contribution to traces many fields in American studies.—Shelley S. Streeby, University of California, San Diego

Blum argues persuasively for seamen as both producers and consumers of literature, and she makes vivid the self-conscious ways in which they participated in a tradition of writing about shipboard life and about the nature of experience itself. She renews interest in the narratives of Nathaniel Ames, William Leggett, David Porter, and John Sherburne Sleeper and transforms our understanding of the maritime writings of Cooper, Poe, and Melville.—Samuel Otter, University of California, Berkeley

Editorial Reviews

A rich meditation on the literary culture of early national and antebellum sailors and the cultural work their narratives performed.—New England Quarterly

A much-needed literary and cultural critic's perspective.—American Historical Review

Thanks to this fascinating and informative study, it is as difficult to conceive of maritime literature without sailor narratives as it is to remember that the contributions of sailors to literary culture have until this moment gone unrecognized in literary history.—Common-Place

Essential reading for those interested in the sea and in narrative theory.—The Journal of American History

[An] intelligently argued book.—International Journal of Maritime History

A dense, highly intellectual study of American sea writing in the first half of the nineteenth century. . . . Provocative and thoughtful.—Maryland Historical Magazine

From the Publisher