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

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

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.

Back Jacket

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.

Author Biography

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.