Examines the cultural importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination The long nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast, which could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation - a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production. Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. The collection offers essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies and includes interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies, and cultural geography. Key Features Presents new essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies Offers interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography Questions traditional scholarly period boundaries by spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries

To write about the sea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to do so against a vast accretion of past deeds, patterns of thought, and particularly patterns of expression, many of which had begun to feel not just settled but exhausted. The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language takes up this circumstance, showing how prose writers in this period grappled with the super-conventionalized nature of the sea as a setting, as a shaper of plot and character, as a structuring motif, and as a source of metaphor. But while writing about the sea required careful negotiation of multiple andsometimes conflicting associations, the sea's multiplicity and freight function not just as impediments to thought or expression but as sources of intellectual and expressive possibilities. The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language treats a provocatively diverse group of key authors spanning from the 1830s to the 1930s and including both those inextricably associated with the sea (Frederick Marryat, Joseph Conrad) and those whose writings are less obviously marine, such as Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Virginia Woolf. What these writers share, among other things, is that they simultaneously register and turn to account the difficulties that attend writing about, and writing with, the sea. In the process, their sea-writing sheds new light on the value of marginalized representational techniques including repetition, cliche, and imprecision.

Examines the cultural importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination The long nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast, which could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation - a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production. Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. The collection offers essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies and includes interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies, and cultural geography. Key Features Presents new essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies Offers interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography Questions traditional scholarly period boundaries by spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries