‘Dead to the World, and Almost to Ourselves’: William Mackay's Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno (1798)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers William Mackay's 1789 narrative of the wreck of the East India Company ship, Juno, in the light of recent studies of the genre of shipwreck narrative by Blackmore, Lamb and Thompson. It reads the narrative as reflecting the dynamics of symbolic abdication experienced by survivors during such catastrophes, but proceeds to identify Mackay's efforts to discover, in the language of sentiment that was so central to the eighteenth-century episteme, a rhetorical means to imagine the preservation of a threatened (existential and social) selfhood. The article is also centrally concerned with the intertextuality of Mackay's narrative, and its dissemination into a variety of works in the century following its publication.