Navigating Cultural Spaces: Maritime Places

Abstract

Abstract space becomes concrete place by being bound to individual and historical experience. Sea and coast – in texts from antiquity to the present mostly seen as mere spaces of transit and division between geographical places – are hotly contested topographical phenomena, which instigate the designation of highly semanticized cultural spaces in imagination and everyday practice. Literature has always been a central agent of the maritime cultural imaginary through the initiation and negotiation of competing versions of coast and sea. This anthology offers international research on historically specific functions of maritime spaces as historicized places, where national and individual identities, cultural exchange, a globalized economy, and ‘the technical sublime’ are dramatized. The essays focus on literature from Shakespeare through British literary history to David Dabydeen, Yann Martel, and Australian author Stephen Orr, but also on film (James Cameron, Danny Boyle), cartography, and historiographical accounts of Irish migration or Caribbean piracy in the late 17th century. They enlarge the field of ‘Hermeneutical Sea Studies’, an only recently established area of Cultural Studies. The book is targeted at an academic audience, while retaining a high level of appeal for any reader who is interested in popular culture. As the anthology combines theoretical approaches with practical case studies, it is suitable for courses at university level, both graduate and undergraduate.

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