Oceans

Abstract

I N these pages in 2015 Jesse Oak Taylor asked "Where is Victorian Ecocriticism?,"remarking that the "striking thing about Victorian ecocriticism is that there is so little of it." 1 Victorian ecocriticism, sometimes called "green studies," has risen to the challenge with exciting new titles such as Taylor's own A Sky of Our Making: London Fog from Coleridge to Woolf. 2 However, Victorian ecocriticism-and literary and eco-studies at large-has only just begun to expand its reach to the sea.Steve Mentz writes that "Pining for the green solidarity of land, ecocriticism has largely failed to develop models for encountering blue oceans." 3 He calls for a "blue ecocriticism" or "blue cultural studies," writing that "we need a poetic history of the oceans." 4 Victorianists are well disposed to answer this call.The turn toward transnational and hemispheric approaches to literary studies is especially well suited to a "blue" Victorian ecocriticism, as the constellations of ports and maritime shipping routes provide nodes along which so many of our narratives are conducted.In a period in which Britannia so thoroughly "rules the waves," how does literature account for what might be lurking in those waves and for the joys and terrors of life on-or near-the sea?Of Romantic oceans, Samuel Baker has argued that the Lake Poets "invented the idea of 'culture'" in the early nineteenth century by "framing their picture of human life as a whole within the horizon of a common experience of the sea," 5 and new monographs and collections are finally accounting for their Victorian heirs.Andrew Nash has recently published on the long-neglected Victorian nautical novelist William Clark Russell; Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas's collection The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture includes an impressive range of perspectives; and Charlotte Mathieson's edited collection Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present reflects on the relationship between the sea and literary production.6 Other exciting work is forthcoming, such as Matthew Kerr's Boundless: The Language of the Sea in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, which argues that the "vagueness of sea writing offers a useful paradigm for thinking about literary language itself."7 "Blue" Victorian ecocriticism will also feature in Will Abberley's forthcoming collection Underwater Worlds: Aquatic Visions in Art and Literature, based on the conference of the same name at the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) in 2015.

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