Crafty Sailors, Unruly Seas: Margaret Cohen’s Oceanic History of the Novel

Abstract

CRAFTY SAILORS, UNRULY SEAS: MARGARET COHEN'S OCEANIC HISTORY OF THE NOVEL Novel and by Margaret Cohen. Translation/Transnation, edited by Emily Apter. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 2010. Pp. xiii + 306, 30 illustrations. $39.50 cloth.Maritime studies, as traditionally practiced by naval historians and marine archaeologists, concentrates its efforts on battles, cargoes, and coastal events. But more recent development of an interdis-ciplinary oceanic studies has sought to place continental issues in background, focusing instead on space between departure and arrival. Part of argument for oceanic studies is that experience of being voyaging culture indelibly marks other-terrestrial-expressions, such as national philosophies, literature, and art. However, until recently, as Hester Blum argues, [t]he oceans comprise realm in which cultural exchange, whether dominant, resistant, or just circulatory, has not been of primary concern in its own terms-that is, independent of seas' function as passage for travel.1 Still developing as field, practitioners try to understand importance of oceanic space and history to modern culture; particular experience of maritime laborers, passengers, and captives; and significance of transported and transplanted people, crops, and animals to biological and ecological environments. Margaret Cohen's recent monograph Novel and (2010), relatively early in this fluid discipline, makes strong case for value and promise of oceanic literary studies.This ambitious book can be separated into two broad hemispheres that contain main argument, and an Interlude. first main section examines early modern period and longish eighteenth century to 1824. second covers roughly 1824 to early 1900s but concludes looking toward twentieth century and beyond. intervening Interlude is concerned with developments during long Romantic period.The book opens with two lengthy chapters, The Mariner's Craft and Remarkable Occurrences at and in Novel, and slight third, Sea Adventure Fiction, 1748-1824? which examine early modern treatises on seamanship and narratives written following Captain James Cook's voyages as precursors to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and eighteenth-century maritime adventure novel. Cohen imaginatively and convincingly proposes relationship between technical and traditional lore of pragmatic seafarer, his and influence of maritime fiction and nonfiction on development of novel over eighteenth century. By reproducing rational logic of early modern sea narrative, maritime adventure novel produces what Cohen calls cunning reader (79), who imaginatively enters voyage narratives, novels, and explorers' reports to enact readerly mariner's craft, or a poetics of problemsolving (86).The Interlude, titled The Sublimation of Sea, addresses fascination with sublime that for many characterizes long Romantic period from Milton to Byron. This chapter's sublimation insists on depopulation of sea as it is reimagined by poets as an empty aesthetic space devoid of craft. Cohen provides compelling readings of Milton, Byron, and-especially welcome-John Falconer's long poem Shipwreck (1762), as well as reviewing aesthetic works of Edmund Burke, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, and John Baillie. contrast of Dutch maritime genre painting with Turner's later works is particularly rewarding. However, her assertion that during the eighteenth century, qualification of sublime was increasingly applied by philosophers and writers to ocean cut off from work (115) is incomplete. Cohen does not read nautical panegyrics of Edward Young that sought to render mercantile achievement in terms of aesthetic sublimity or renewed popularity of georgic during period. …