Maritime ModernismSeas, Coasts and Islands in British and Irish Literatures
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About this book
A comparative study of seas, coasts and islands as sites of post-imperial consciousness in the modernist fiction and poetry of the British Isles
- Considers British and Irish modernist literature together by using seas and islands as a common context
- Scottish modernism, comparatively neglected in “Brit Lit” studies, receives equal treatment, and Welsh modernism is also considered
- Builds upon new maritime, ecological approaches to British and Irish literature by John Brannigan and Nicholas Allen, while also arguing for comparative and postcolonial approaches
- Contains the first ever article or chapter on Claire Spencer’s 1935 novel The Island as well as original approaches to marginalized writers Gunn, Bowen, and Roberts
By tracing maritime settings and contexts across modernist literature in Britain and Ireland, Maritime Modernism: Seas, Coasts and Islands in British and Irish Literature reveals new connections between the period’s key texts as well as evidence of how cultural and political relationships to water can differ significantly depending upon one’s vantage point. While writers across the archipelago employed coastal, nautical and oceanic imagery to challenge the narratives and cartographies of maritime-imperial Britain, authors in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales also differ in the ways they imagine the sea/land relationship, and its histories, against the backdrop of a devolving United Kingdom. Major authors such as Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and W.B. Yeats are studied alongside less well-known writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Lynette Roberts, David Jones, Neil Gunn and Claire Spencer.
Reviews
Maritime Modernism: Seas, Coasts and Islands in British and Irish Literatures will form a substantial and important addition to contemporary conversations in modernist studies specifically and literary studies in general. The book builds on recent scholarship in “hydro-criticism” and the Blue Humanities and addresses the intertwined material histories of land and sea across the British Isles.
Table of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1. Recovering Islands: Scotland, Ocean, and Archipelago in To the Lighthouse
2. Celtic Hydrology: Water and the British Littoral from D.H. Lawrence to David Jones
3. "‘Oed’ und leer das Meer": T.S. Eliot’s Island Culture
4. ‘The Invulnerable Tide’: Water, Nation, and Nature in W.B. Yeats
5. James Joyce, Ireland, and Oceanic Double Consciousness
6. ‘A Dream of Far Sea Surge’: Water as Place in Neil Gunn
7. A Tragedy of Figure and Ground: Claire Spencer’s The Island
Conclusion: Elizabeth Bowen and the Hyphenated Archipelago
Works Cited
Index