Shipboard Literary Cultures: Reading, Writing, and Performing at Sea

by Susann Liebich (Editor), Laurence Publicover (Editor)

Overview

The 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030853419
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	12/24/2021
Series:	Maritime Literature and Culture
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	291
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Susann Liebich is Assistant Professor of Modern History at Heidelberg University, Germany. She is a co-author of The Transported Imagination (Cambria Press, 2018) and has published on the history of reading and on Australian and New Zealand periodicals in the interwar period. Her current research focuses on the sea in personal writing and popular print culture.

Laurence Publicover is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Dramatic Geography (Oxford University Press, 2017) and of several articles on early modern literature, maritime culture, and their intersections. His current research focuses on the deep sea and seabed in literary and non-literary contexts.

Table of Contents

Chapter 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).

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Investigating how the material and imagined ocean and the physical and social spaces of ships shape practices of reading, writing, and performing, this collection contributes richly to ocean history. The essays explore the delicious specificity of ships and seas, yet reveal patterns of literary culture forged by social hierarchy, economic difference, appreciation of skill, observation of marine life, hopes for the future, and the capriciousness of natural forces.” (Helen Rozwadowski, Professor of History, University of Connecticut, USA)

Editorial Reviews

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)

From the Publisher