Shipwreck Narratives Research Articles

Jamin Wells. Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach.

In Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach, Jamin Wells argues that shipwrecks were essential to the transformation of the American shoreline from an isolated, largely unoccupied, and repulsive space in the late eighteenth century to a well-regulated and beloved playground at the end of the nineteenth century. In doing so, Wells brings a fresh perspective to the history of the seaside by connecting it with frontier historiography and the environmental history of disasters. According to a well-trodden narrative, most famously associated with historian Alain Corbin’s Lure of the Sea (1994), Europeans long turned their back to the coast, which they associated with the biblical deluge, marine monsters, pirates, and invaders. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, these fears had dissipated, and Europeans from all walks of life aspired to stroll, and even live, on the seaside. Where Corbin and others highlighted the cultural forces behind this momentous change—romantic sensibilities, medical discourses, and scientific discoveries—“materialists” saw the transportation and communication revolutions at work, connecting shorelines ever more closely to cities. Building on both arguments, Wells shows that there is a unique and specifically American version to this narrative and that shipwrecks are essential to it. On the shores of the early republic—more specifically the coastal communities situated between Boston and Philadelphia—shipwrecks were “common, almost daily occurrences” (5). In an economy dominated by maritime commerce, they represented major loss for the federal government and vessel owners, as well as tragic events. Over the course of the century, efforts by private groups and the government to prevent shipwrecks, save lives, and regulate salvage work “domesticated” the shore. In parallel, journalistic and fictional shipwreck narratives introduced Americans to the coast and its people. In the process, the unruly, frightening shoreline of yesteryear morphed into the “modern beach, a thoroughly commercialized, contested, and engineered space that is at the heart of the American experience” (2).

Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media ed. by Jakub Lipski, and: Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years ed. by Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley

Reviewed by: Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media ed. by Jakub Lipski, and: Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years ed. by Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley Andrew O'Malley Jakub Lipski, ed., Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 212. $34.95 paper, $120.00 cloth. Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley, eds., Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press) 2021. Pp. 234; 22 b/w and 7 color illus. $42.50 paper, $150.00 cloth. The 2019 tricentenary of the publication of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (and of its sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) has understandably seen renewed interest in Defoe's most famous literary creation. As has often been noted, it is hard to overstate the extent of Robinson Crusoe's cultural impact; so embedded in the popular psyche are aspects of the story that the image of a person on a desert island, or of a footprint in the sand, universally evokes it. Two recent volumes of essays from Bucknell University Press offer convincing reminders of Crusoe's remarkable, transmedial legacy and continued cultural relevance. Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media, edited by Jakub Lipski, concerns itself primarily, as the title suggests, with the protean genre to which Defoe's novel quickly gave rise: "Our main concern here then is studying the Robinsonade as a genre in a constant state of becoming, transcending, as it were, any formal restrictions one might impose on it" (1). Examples of this genre began appearing within a few years of Robinson Crusoe's initial publication; the term itself was coined by the German author, Johann Gottfried Schnabel, to describe his own island shipwreck narrative, Die Insel Felsenburg (1731). Since that time, the island castaway narrative has been adapted to virtually every imaginable category of reader, and has migrated across an incredibly wide range of media: theatrical productions, film, comic books, toys, games, and innumerable commercial enterprises and consumer goods. The collection's first of [End Page 313] four sections, "Exploring and Transcending the Genre," appropriately offers two very strong essays that bookend the literary Robinsonade's history to date. Rivka Swenson's chapter looks back to one of the earliest and most successful examples of the genre, Peter Longueville's The Hermit (1727), and is followed by Patrick Gill's study of recent postmodern examples. Swenson's revisiting of Longueville's entertaining, imaginative but understudied novel persuasively considers its repeatedly referenced eating, food preparation, and pickling—"the act of preserving and transforming" (12)—as a metaphor for narrative world-building practices in the period's fiction. Noting insightfully that Robinson Crusoe serves as "the perfect sandbox setting" (24), offering endless narrative possibilities, Gill's study considers the original novel with Muriel Spark's Robinson (1958), J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), and Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2001) using the philosophical thought experiment of the "counterfactual" to explore the poetics of the genre. Chapters in the second section, "National Contexts," turn to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expansion of the Robinsonade into other European national literatures. Przemysław Uściński, in his nuanced study of The Female American (1767), attempts to complicate the colonial legacy of the Robinsonade by invoking Homi Bhabha's idea of a "third space" that troubles "the fixity of any cultural identity" (50). Employing, unusually for an eighteenth-century Robinsonade, a "biracial female missionary as proxy for colonialist power," The Female American raises but ultimately sidesteps "historically urgent questions about justice, agency, and accountability" (50). Editor Jakub Lipski provides a fascinating account of Robinson Crusoe's reception and its role in the rise to prominence of the novel in the literary culture of eighteenth-century Poland. While I was aware that Robinson Crusoe was translated fairly quickly into many European languages (and eventually into virtually every written language, even Esperanto), Lipski's intriguing history of how both its Polish translation and Ignacy Krasicki's Defoeinspired The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom helped change national literary tastes was a revelation to me. The remaining two chapters...

The Metaphor of House and Post-Colonial Identity Formation in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi

Since its publication in 2001, Life of Pi has been interpreted from various perspectives, such as biblical allusion (Kyser), shipwreck narrative (Dwyer), maternal cannibalism (Thorn) and cultural m...

Shipwreck and Psychosis: Sheila Fugard’s The Castaways

Sheila Fugard’s The Castaways (1972) is neglected in South African literary historiography because its experimental modernism was at odds with the emphasis in the 1970s on politically committed literature. Further, its dialogism and preoccupation with the spiritual inflection of whiteness make it, at times, recondite. Fugard resets the events of the wreck of the Indiaman Grosvenor in 1782 as the hallucinated interiority of Christiaan Jordan, an escaped inmate of a psychiatric institution. The destruction of the ship and fate of her castaways (and contemporary parallels) constitute the language of his psychosis. This inward turn of shipwreck narrative is occasionally apparent in the historical and literary archive but is developed most fully and resonantly in The Castaways. While this essay considers and contextualizes the novel, it also places in counterpoint a fragmented account of my obsession with shipwreck and personal history of psychosis and dissociation. The two levels of writing are intended to set up eddies in a watery relation.

Maritime Disasters and Collective Identities: Surviving Shipwreck in Early Modern Portugal

This article focuses on one of the twelve Portuguese shipwreck narratives collected by historian Bernardo Gomes de Brito in Historia tragico-maritima (1735–36), Naufragio que passou Jorge de Albuquerque Coelho, capitao, e governador de Pernambuco (1601). Several features make this account unique. Unlike the majority of the shipwrecks which occur off the southeastern African coast, this maritime disaster takes place in the Atlantic. Furthermore, the narrative's title refers to its captain and not to the name of the carrack, which ironically never completely shipwrecks, but just barely survives its arduous journey. Building on Josiah Blackmore's reading of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts as symptomatic of counter-historiographic impulse to the official textual culture of imperialism, I explore how this story of survival and rupture, while striving to represent subjectivity, in fact, disrupts the country's expansionist rhetoric by pointing instead to the emergence of collective identities. The essay explores the ways in which the narrative interrogates the individualization or subjectivization processes reflected rhetorically in the text. The formal and stylistic practices at play in the account show how shipwreck narratives of maritime disasters unsettle early modern conceptualizations of subjective and ontological experiences and reflect a plural and collective framework of thought.

Perils of Protection: Shipwrecks, Orphans, and Children’s Rights by Susan Honeyman

Reviewed by: Perils of Protection: Shipwrecks, Orphans, and Children’s Rights by Susan Honeyman Anna Mae Duane Perils of Protection: Shipwrecks, Orphans, and Children’s Rights. By Susan Honeyman. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2019. vii + 226 pp. Paper $30, cloth $90. Susan Honeyman’s excellent Perils of Protection asks us to consider the fraught dialectic between the urge to protect children and the need to silence them. At a moment when we in the US watch, aghast, as thousands of migrant children are incarcerated under the auspices of government protection, Honeyman’s historically informed analysis of the ways in which protection has overridden children’s rights—to knowledge, to self-determination, and to political agency—offers a much-needed genealogy of our troubled relationship to children’s vulnerability and adult responses to it. This ambitious book sets out to “follow the historic material roots of protectionism” (12) and Honeyman does so by moving deftly between both historical and literary accounts of shipwrecks, orphan rescues, and even cancer narratives. In the process, she pulls off several balancing acts. The first is stylistic: her inviting, even informal prose cannily navigates complex theoretical and historical arguments about the nature of privacy, the origins of rights discourse, and our cultural uncertainty about the distinction between personhood and property in familial relations. In addition to its rhetorical adroitness, Perils of Protection balances historically rigorous, chronologically specific arguments about the ways that past authors have imagined the relationship between protectionism and participation, while at the same time paying nuanced attention to present crises as they are playing out in twenty-first century policy. The chapters trace a genealogy in which children’s (often perilous) freedoms are exchanged for safety as the private family becomes increasingly defined as a [End Page 324] bulwark against the world’s predations. For Honeyman, this is not a voluntary, or entirely benevolent, development. The increased pressure on the privatized family to carefully manage every aspect of a child’s development, coupled with a cultural investment in an ever more sacrificial version of parenthood, results in a stifling hothouse environment that hurts the very children cocooned within it. “How can protection, which sounds so comforting, do harm?” Honeyman asks. “Like the children we imagine are helpless, we simply don’t know better. Our emotions get the better of us, and our stories do little to challenge our misguided consciences” (9). Honeyman’s analysis of those stories begins with nineteenth-century shipwreck narratives that allegedly gave us the sentimental order to put “women and children” first. As Honeyman points out, vulnerable youth usually fared poorly in historical seafaring disasters, and even romanticized versions of shipwreck stories often left small children entirely out of the rescue narrative in favor of appealingly helpless and imperiled young girls. The erotic charge of rescuing dependent women became solidified in the romanticizing of the Titanic as a model in which women and children’s helplessness became showcases for male strength and sacrifice. Moving from historical shipwrecks to literary ones, Honeyman traces the reception and evolution of the shipwrecked orphan in Robinson Crusoe and its descendants, in which the freedom of young men to “find their fortune” became linked with the conquest of vulnerable people pressed into the service of increasingly privatized (and proprietary) colonial “families.” A child’s capacity to move—over land and sea, from property to property owner, from lower class urchin to the cherished pet project of Daddy Warbucks—emerges in Honeyman’s analysis as an imaginative barometer of cultural change. As the stories we tell and read became increasingly unable to imagine a child who can find their own way through the world, dangers and all, then the more elaborate—and constraining—the confines of protection. The book ends with the confinement of a hospital room as Honeyman traces the protective impulses of both fictional and real-world parents to protect their children from the knowledge of their own terminal illnesses. Although often well-intentioned, Honeyman suggests, this desire to keep children from knowing the state of their own bodies rarely spares young people any suffering. Instead, adults’ insistence on cheerful pretense stifles the grief and closure that children needed to experience...

Visions of Disaster in theUnlucky Voyage of the ShipBatavia, 1647

This article examines the illustrated pamphletOngeluckige voyagie, van’t schipBatavia (Unlucky voyage of the shipBatavia) and its representation of a 1629 shipwreck off the coast of western Australia, followed by mutiny and the massacre of many survivors. The pamphlet was published in Amsterdam in 1647, and included fifteen (six full-page) fine copper engravings. It was very popular, helping to shape a new genre of shipwreck narrative and expressing the preoccupations of contemporary visual culture. The pamphlet’s illustrations translated new conceptualisations of space emerging from the period’s unique collaboration between cartography and art into popular form within a booming Dutch print culture. Through innovative techniques of montage and vignette these engraved images conveyed the narrative’s drama and affirmed principles of morality, honour, and order. While the era’s spectacular violence now seems very far away, these historical images effectively communicate the contemporary relish of the disaster to modern audiences. This “earliest of Australian books” is sometimes offered as an alternative Australian foundation myth, and theBataviadisaster continues to grow in cultural significance. Now as then, these illustrations provide a vivid counterpoint to its audience’s comfortable lives.

Diagnosing “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: Shipwreck, Historicism, Traumatology

FORGING A NEW HISTORICISM AVANT LA LETTRE IN THE ROAD TO XANADU (1927), John Livingston Lowes claimed that in his voracious consumption of voyage narratives prior to writing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge read an eye which habitually pierced to the secret spring of poetry beneath the crust of fact. (1) Recognizing the poem as supreme crystallisation of the spirit of expansion, (2) New Historicism has subsequently embraced the task of excavating the poem with an eye that pierces to the secret layers of fact beneath the crust of poetry. History's quarried particulars, identified since the early 1960s, have ranged from (premonitions of) a slaver, (3) colonial expansion, European racial the killing of a slave, and abolition propaganda (4) to the pathogenesis and material conditions of yellow fever, (5) the terror of impressment, (6) tremors of faith, political complicity, (7) misplaced jacobinism, national guilt, (8) and the psychodrama of Coleridge's own neuroses projection, albeit an exaggerated one, of intellectual and emotional tendencies in himself). (9) Each has been tailored with varying degrees of persuasiveness to the layered contours of The Ancient Mariner. In all of this, the ostensible--and not easily exorcisable--master-narrative of unthinking transgression, horrific castigation, compound penance, and compulsive restitution has retained its power both to accommodate and to contest historicist readings. Carl Thompson has emphasized that The Ancient is crucially indebted to what he terms the scripts of contemporary shipwreck narratives and the literature of maritime misadventure. (10) In this essay, I offer a new interdisciplinary reading of The Ancient that identifies the traumatic subjectivity of the Mariner-as-shipwreck-survivor as the very condition of the poem's narration. Further, I credit Coleridge with a remarkably prescient dramatization--an empathetic inhabitation--of a condition of trauma codified only in the late twentieth century: post-traumatic stress disorder. 1. Diagnostic Uncertainty As the core event to be excavated in The Ancient Mariner, naufrage (literally, the breaking of a ship) and its traumatic aftermath clearly represent a different order of fact from those already listed above. However, some of the critical methods I deploy will be recognizable to those familiar with materialist excavations of Romantic texts. At the outset, it is worth profiling the acute hermeneutic challenge posed by the poem. Interpretation is taxed by the poem's sheer (11) and omnisignificance; (12) its multiple vocalities that collapse borders of speech; its relativization of centers of authority; and its knowing interpellation of the reader by means of seductive totalizing schemas that elicit what J. R. Ebbatson has described as Pavlovian critical responses. (13) As Raimonda Modiano has shown, some of the most robust historicist readings fail to extricate themselves from the alluring, essentialist interpretative frames the poem promotes, just as the Mariner himself can be seen to order his nightmare experience within orthodox paradigms that guarantee the social acceptability of his story--indeed, its very communicabilky. (14) Critical readings have wrestled with the apparent emptiness of the poem's historical referentiality (a vacuum that actively invites us to supply our own excess of historical data), its construction of an undomestic atopia, a site both maddeningly blank and refractive of the fragments of mythology once attached to its textual representations, (15) and the arbitrariness and irrationality that characterize the poem's cosmos. (16) Further teasing aporiae (for which my own reading will have to account) include the repudiation of rationalist cartography and the seemingly programmatic elision of what David Simpson has called the work of running a ship. …

Tales of Misery and Woe

Tales of Misery and Woe Matthew Mulcahy (bio) Kathleen Donegan. Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 288pages. Notes and index. $49.95. Amy Mitchell-Cook. A Sea of Misadventures: Shipwreck and Survival in Early America. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013. ix + 229 pages. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Almost thirty years ago, John C. Burnham wrote a short essay in Perspectives entitled “A Neglected Field: The History of Natural Disasters.”1 Burnham had become interested in the topic after being invited to serve on a team of academics investigating the impact of the 1964 Alaskan earthquake. He rushed to the library in search of materials on the history of earthquakes, but he found only antiquarian or journalistic (and often sensationalist) accounts with no real analysis. Feeling he had little to contribute as a historian, Burnham stayed home from the trip, but the experience alerted him to the important work on disasters being undertaken by sociologists, political scientists, and others. A few “pioneering” historical studies had appeared by the time Burnham taught a graduate seminar in the mid-1980s, but the field remained relatively underdeveloped. He put out his call for more research in 1988. Burnham’s essay is not cited as frequently as it should be, but his call for greater attention to historical disasters has been more than fulfilled. Far from being neglected, the history of disasters has become a vibrant and innovative subfield. A flood (avalanche?—pick your disaster metaphor) of works has appeared on library shelves in recent years. In some cases, historians have focused on individual events, such as the Great Chicago Fire or the 1927 Mississippi River flood, narrating both the event itself as well as tracing its impact on social relations, political policies, or urban design, among other topics. Others use various disasters as a lens through which to explore larger preexisting social, political, economic, and cultural conditions at a particular time or place. Still others have investigated the place of disasters in American popular consciousness across time. Much of this work is interdisciplinary in the best sense, drawing on diverse sources and literatures in an effort to make [End Page 434] sense of disasters and their effects on past societies. Much of it has also focused on the late nineteenth or twentieth centuries (some variant on “the making of modern America” often appears in subtitles), but scholars increasingly are turning to earlier periods as well, including the colonial era. The books under review here are part of this expanding literature and share several features. Both focus on a select group of texts: in Mitchell-Cook’s case, 100 shipwreck narratives; in Kathleen Donegan’s, a few classic accounts written by colonists detailing the early history of colonial settlements. Both are concerned with issues of identity in one form or other. And both focus on the failure or near-failure of voyages and settlements. Nevertheless, these are quite different books, covering different time periods, asking different questions, and employing different methodologies. They also differ in their approach to the idea of disaster. Mitchell-Cook focuses on a single kind of event—the shipwreck—and traces how survivors (and readers) made sense of such events across several centuries. Donegan offers a more expansive view of disaster in a shorter time frame. For her, catastrophe refers to a variety of events—“mass starvation, sieges, mutinies, desecrated corpses, slaughtered children, shipwrecks, fire, delusional fantasies, and abandonment” (p. 5)—but also to the general state of affairs in the early years of Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, where such events seemed to come one after another. She focuses less on the history of particular events than on how such events created conditions that overwhelmed colonists, overturned their understanding of “settlement,” undermined their links to England, and shaped a distinct colonial identity. It is not a history of disasters so much as an engaging and thought-provoking account of the place of disaster and failure in the colonial origins of the American imagination. Donegan argues that while historians have long highlighted the failure of Roanoke, the litany of troubles and temporary abandonment of Jamestown, and...

Community and Exclusion: The Torrey Canyon Disaster of 1967

Oral historians have only recently begun to record the memories of communities af- fected by major oil spills. In this article we investigate how the first supertanker oil spill in 1967, the Torrey Canyon, is remembered in the coastal communities of Cornwall. Environmental disasters cause more than just environmental damage. They also challenge communities, bringing to the forefront social tensions and con- flicts. This study reveals the widespread sense of exclusion within the community as the national political, military and scientific elites took control over the clean-up op- eration. While aspects of the disaster have been successfully integrated into existing Cornish shipwreck narratives, the displacement of local hierarchies of knowledge by national elites challenged both personal and community identities revealing a subal- tern community, often economically vulnerable, whose indigenous knowledge was ignored or devalued. Connecting these dimensions of community memory is the fundamentally moral question of intent, and the resistance to imposed peripheral status enacted through processes of remembering, telling of trickster tales and black humor.

Shipwrecked: disaster and transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and the modern world

Shipwrecked: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe and the Modern World presents the first comparative study of notable literary shipwrecks from the past 4,000 years, focusing on Homer's Odyssey , Shakespeare's The Tempest , and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe . The recurrent treatment of shipwrecks in epic poetry, drama, novels, science fiction, movies, and television demonstrates an enduring fascination with this archetypal scene: a shipwreck survivor confronting the elements. It is remarkable, for example, that the characters in the 2004 television show Lost share so many features with those from Homer's Odyssey and Shakespeare's The Tempest . When survivors are stuck on an island for some period of time, shipwrecks often present the survivor with the possibility of a change in political and social status--as well as romance and even paradise. In each of the major shipwreck narratives examined, the poet or novelist links the castaways' arrival on a new shore with the possibility of a new sort of life. James V. Morrison also considers the historical context as well as the triggers (such as the 1609 Bermuda shipwreck) that inspired some of these works, and modern responses such as novels (Golding's Lord of the Flies, Coetzee's Foe , and Gordon's First on Mars , a science fiction version of the Crusoe story), movies, television ( Forbidden Planet, Cast Away, and Lost ), and the poetry and plays of Caribbean poets Derek Walcott and Aime Cesaire.

The muddy middle-ground: representing the wreck of the Wager

This article presents a narrative analysis of the wreck of the Wager, a small sixth rate converted Indiaman of 28 guns that functioned as a supply ship on the Anson expedition (1740–4). In 1741, despite the efforts of the crew to bring her about, she wedged between two rocky islets off the inhospitable Patagonian coast of Chile. Despite the carnivalesque insubordination of a section of the crew, about 140 men made shore and those who remained on board, to pillage the grog and coin, followed a few days later. They found themselves hiding from the harsh weather and foraging along a generally barren coastline. Increasing factionalism ensued as the commander, Captain Cheap, began to lose control of the men. The explanations for the growing dissent vary depending on whose narrative we read. This analysis contrasts various accounts, some of which vilify the ‘mutineers’ while others explain the ascendance of the gunner, John Bulkeley, and the carpenter, John Cummins, as an inevitable consequence of the multiple failures of the selfish, capricious and incompetent Cheap. These discrepancies are interpreted by reading the narratives alongside studies of the Georgian navy, the genre of shipwreck narrative and the dynamics of discontent and insubordination in the eighteenth century. The second part of the article turns to a contemporary representation of the wreck of the Wager – Patrick O'Brian's The unknown shore (1959) – and argues that the novelist's inability or refusal to engage the complexities of the politics of the castaways articulates with the generally conservative agenda of contemporary popular maritime fiction. This suggests that certain representations of dissent are perpetuated in the present at the (ideological) expense of others.

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

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.

<i>Women & Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives & American Identity</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Women & Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives & American Identity Patrick Gleason Women & Children First: Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives & American Identity. By Robin Miskolcze. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. xxii + 220 pp. $45.00. In the ambitious book Women & Children First, Robin Miskolcze marks an important intervention in the current revaluation of maritime studies by arguing that images of women at sea were intertwined with a national crisis in masculinity and political identity in nineteenth-century America. Drawing on the work of Atlantic studies scholars such as W. Jeffrey Bolster, Donald P. Wharton, and Paul Gilroy, Miskolcze reveals how national dramas were often played out on the seas, particularly through narratives involving women and maritime disaster. Her central argument revolves around anxieties over the capitalist drive toward individualism in the latter eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, particularly as ideas defining manhood through duty to community and family gave way to the nineteenth-century cult of the self-made man. Shipwreck narratives involving women made use of the selfless behavior of men in saving women and children as a means to measure the moral scope of national manhood, providing a justification for American exceptionalism. These narratives, Miskolcze argues, were highly malleable. They provided both didactic materials for religious leaders to enforce Christian ideals of divine punishment and salvation and counterbalances to the morally destabilizing self-made man. They also allowed for white men of virtually any economic class to display valor and selfless behavior. Miskolcze singles out the international humiliation that the United States faced after the sinking of the USS Arctic, in which panicked officers and sailors saved themselves but left 314 of the 400 passengers to perish, including all of the women and children. This disgrace, Miskolcze argues, helped to codify the emerging maritime adage of "women and children first" (xi). Following the introduction, Miskolcze continues with chapters on Middle Passage narratives, Englishwomen and US shipwreck narratives, and the figure of the cross-dressed female sailor in antebellum US literature. The section on the Middle Passage contains some of the author's strongest claims, highlighted by an original and important analysis of its symbolic role in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Middle Passage, [End Page 164] Miskolcze claims, provided Jacobs with the central metaphor of her enslavement: her hiding in the small attic space in her grandmother's shed as her means of escape. Even though Jacobs was not taken across the Atlantic herself, Miskolcze reads her description of the confining space as drawing on the experiences of slaves in the holds of ships, what she terms "a reshaping of the cultural memory of the Middle Passage" (77). Reading Jacobs's reference to Robinson Crusoe as an attempt to shift from slave ship to shipwreck narrative, Miskolcze highlights Jacobs's refashioning of herself from object to subject as she associates herself with the reasoning narrator and dynamic survivor of Daniel Defoe's tale of shipwreck (78–79). Analyzing the references to maritime travel and peril as structuring Nancy Prince's writing, Miskolcze here also persuasively demonstrates how African American women in the nineteenth century made use of the cultural memory of the Middle Passage in diverse and productive ways (74–77). The remainder of the book is concerned with English and American women at sea, both in the highly popular early-nineteenth-century Barbary captivity narratives and as cross-dressing sailors in works such as Fanny Campbell, The Female Marine, and James Fenimore Cooper's maritime novels. In these chapters, Miskolcze argues that shipwreck narratives and maritime novels "[use] the sea as a site for acting out the social concerns of the dominant social imaginary" (101). These concerns took the form of challenges to US national identity in the wake of the War of 1812, as with the publication of highly popular accounts of British femininity at risk on the seas and through Cooper's naval trilogy, in which anxieties of westward expansion for a new generation of American men are represented through the figure of the cross-dressed sailor. Such texts intriguingly move east into the Atlantic to explore the West in imaginative fashion, substituting the open sea for...

<i>The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination Elizabeth A. Dolan The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination. By Carl Thompson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 299. ISBN 9780199259984. £45.00. In The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination, Carl Thompson explores the ways in which misadventure came to be highly valued in canonical Romanticism. After cataloguing the tropes or 'scripts' inherent in exploration and maritime adventure narratives, Thompson offers a compelling analysis of the implications of these sources for understanding major poems by Wordsworth and Byron. Although he ultimately writes a successful book, Thompson's explanation of his methodology and scope in the introduction is troubling. Defining his historical scope as 1780–1830, Thompson explicitly excludes women authors from consideration, citing as justification Anne Mellor's and Marlon Ross's seminal studies from the late 1980s, both of which identify a 'masculine' agenda within canonical Romanticism. It is puzzling that Thompson does not take into account the extensive body of scholarship of the last twenty years that builds on these early studies to explore the nuances of gender, specifically in travel writing. On the topic of suffering in travel, one thinks, for example, of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Norway, not least because Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom Thompson discusses in connection with Byron, read the travel narrative on his elopement trip with Mary Shelley. To explore Wollstonecraft's text as a 'script' or even anti-script for Shelley's and Byron's traveller personae would serve to deepen rather than to diminish Thompson's argument. In his first chapter, Thompson offers a helpful explication of the term 'tourist' in the Romantic era, cataloguing the types of travellers – Grand Tourists, picturesque tourists and female tourists – with whom the Romantic anti-tourist contrasts himself. The chapter argues that [End Page 182] Wordsworth and Byron signify their radicalism and disdain for these other modes of tourism by travelling on foot and by emphasising their own suffering and discomfort. Thompson then dives into the archive of the Romantic-era 'Voyages and Travels' genre, and here his careful readings and captivating insights engage, educate and entertain the reader. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the existential and political resonances of narratives written by various 'misadventurers', particularly sailors and survivors of shipwrecks. Thompson deftly identifies the rhetorical and interpretive conventions that make up four categories of misadventure narrative: the providentialist's misadventure, in which the hero's salvation, or, alternatively, his suffering, is 'evidence of election'; the empiricist's fragmented observations; the sceptic's account of a random universe; the sentimentalist's focus on the sufferer rather than God. In each case, shipwreck narratives function as sites of exploration for religious contestations and existential anxieties. Likewise, the 'topos of suffering in travel', Thompson argues, offered writers a vehicle through which to express social and political concerns, particularly in their sympathetic identification with figures such as wanderers, vagrants, exiles and, especially, maritime adventurers. Accounts of the hierarchy on board a ship depict civil authority structures, while accounts of mutiny play out resistance to those structures. Shipwreck narratives thus offer a microcosm for analysing political ideals and conflict in an age of revolution. By Chapter 4, one feels oneself in the hands of an excellent historical and intellectual guide, as Thompson describes the 'exploration "mania" [that] gripped British culture in the Romantic period'. Here Thompson builds upon the scholarship of Nigel Leask, Mary Louise Pratt, Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson to analyse the various ways in which the Romantic imagination constructs the figure of the explorer. He identifies objectivism as one of the primary features of the 'house style' of exploration narratives, and elaborates the ways in which narratives by James Bruce and Mungo Park violate this house style with their emotional accounts of disaster, and thus fuel the major Romantic poets' interest in misadventure. The payoff of this archival and historical work comes in the final two chapters, one on Wordsworth's poetry and the other on Byron's. In his careful reading of the Mount Snowdon episode of The Prelude, Thompson identifies a residue of the Providentialist shipwreck narrative. If Wordsworth looks to those who suffer or survive shipwrecks to convey...

Naufrágio, cativeiro, e relações ibéricas: a História trágico-marítima num contexto comparativo

Esse artigo compara as narrativas portuguesas de naufrágios dos séculos dezesseis e dezessete, muitas das quais foram publicadas no livro História trágico-marítima, de Bernardo Gomes de Brito (1735-1736), com os relatos coevos de naufrágio e cativeiro hispânicos. Ao examinar não só as estratégias e as estruturas das narrativas de naufrágio e cativeiro, mas também suas conexões intertextuais, pretende-se iluminar o contexto ideológico e literário compartilhado pelos impérios ibéricos na modernidade. A comparação permite desnudar ainda a capacidade destas narrativas de divertir os autores e os leitores modernos como também o seu caráter didático e dessa forma questionar as interpretações contemporâneas que ou priorizam a perspectiva nacionalista ou focam-se exclusivamente no aspecto contra-hegemônico contidos nesses textos.

‘Thus Does Man Prove His Fitness to Be the Master of Things’: Shipwrecks, Chivalry and Masculinities in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain

This paper critically examines the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revival of chivalry in Britain, with a particular emphasis on chivalry at sea. It gives a history to the so-called ‘eternal law of the sea’, the chivalric code of ‘women and children first’ during shipwrecks. For most of the nineteenth century, chivalry at sea had been organized around national identity, as well as class and race divisions between men. For Edwardians, the new political claims of women encouraged a new shipwreck narrative, one in which all men, and not merely ruling class or white men, would put women first. The 1912 Titanic disaster can be situated at a historical juncture, a point of choice between chivalry as dividing men, or as distinguishing all men from women. I conclude that it is not appropriate to see the First World War as an abrupt curtailment of an otherwise flourishing chivalric code; chivalry was malleable, vulnerable and open to interpretation before the war, and was still in play after it, though with a new set of emphases that spoke to the concerns of interwar political argument. This paper, then, gives no simple narrative of the ‘rise and fall’ of chivalry, but suggests its continuing salience in interwar Britain, within a changing set of meanings attached to crises at sea.

Yann Martel's Life of Pi and the Evolution of the Shipwreck Narrative

Yann Martel's Life of Pi and the Evolution of the Shipwreck Narrative

Manifest Perdition. Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire de Josiah Blackmore

<i>Manifest Perdition. Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire</i> de Josiah Blackmore

Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2002-2003

The fragility of the notion of identity can be seen in the fact that it is never simply enough to be what one is, rather one must become what one is in order to give shape to that identity, or make it function effectively in political contexts. Yet this is to open up a dangerous gap between identity and identification, for identification in its emphasis on becoming what one is now has the capacity to change the content of identity into virtually anything. —Richard F. Calichman Books Alcock, Susan E. Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscapes, Monuments, and Memories. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002. Focusing on Hellenistic and early Roman Greece, considers how monuments and material culture reflect both collective memory and amnesia. Auyero, Javier. Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Revolution. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Through oral histories, diaries, interviews, public records, and official documents, focuses on two participants in 1990s protest movements in Argentina to show how popular protests are experienced and remembered, individually and collectively. Banks, Elizabeth L. Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in Late Victorian London. Intro. Mary Suzanne Schriber and Abbey Zink. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. Reprint of the 1894 autobiography of an American journalist who went undercover to [End Page 625] investigate the conditions of poor working women in London; the introduction situates Banks and her text in the context of journalism, travel writing, and the "New Woman." Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. Compares colonial prose narratives in Spanish and British America from 1542 to 1800, focusing on shipwreck, captivity, and travel narratives, and imperial and natural histories, to ask how knowledge can be centrally controlled in expanding empires. Beran, Michael. Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind. New York: Free Press, 2003. Account of the "strangeness and originality" of Jefferson. Bernardin, Susan, Melody Graulich, Lisa MacFarlane, and Nicole Tonkovich. Trading Gazes: Euro-American Women Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880-1940. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2003. (Reviewed in Biography 26.4.) Biographical studies of four amateur women photographers—Jane Gay, Kate Cory, Mary Schäffer, and Grace Nicholson—who used photography to establish relations of exchange with Native peoples that challenged the traditional gaze of the dominant culture. Blackmore, Josiah. Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Shows how Portuguese shipwreck narratives from the 1600s and 1700s present an alternative historical record to the official chronicles of the empire. Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: The Self and the World. New York: Routledge, 2002. Focuses on the development of the Anglo-American travel writing tradition, from Boswell through Chatwin. Bloch, R. Howard. The Anonymous Marie de France. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Argues that the first female writer in French was keenly aware of the social and political powers of writing and of its role in preserving cultural memory. Brown, Cecil. Stagolee Shot Billy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Traces the growth of the Stagolee legend and musical variants back to Stack Lee and a murder in St. Louis in 1895. Bruner, Jerome. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. Through autobiography, legal cases, and literature, explores how people make stories to make sense of their lives and of the moral and psychological issues that animate them. [End Page 626] Burton, Antoinette. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Extending the understanding of archival material to the physical spaces of houses and memories of home, examines how women wrote about colonialism, partition, and nation building in India. Couser, G. Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. Explores ethical implications of life writing involving vulnerable subjects, such as those involved in intimate or trust-based relationships, unable to represent...