Macfarlane’s and Dening’s words signal a sea change in recent criticism. If for many years the sea appeared as a blank space in the cultural and critical imagination, then a recent surge of interest has come to assert the histories and geographies that re-centre the sea as an active, vital presence. From a range of critical perspectives, a ‘new wave of thalassography’ has reasserted the significance of the sea in cultural and social theory; no longer positioned as a peripheral ‘other’ to the land or a ‘blank’ space outside of human spatial relations, the sea has been re-centred as a site of history, geography and cultural activity.1 Recent works have studied the ‘human geographies’ of the ocean, worked to envisage ‘the sea as social space’, and explored the ‘cultural seascape’; meanwhile others have sought to historicise the cultural presence of the sea, recovering forgotten and interconnected traces of the sea across diverse cultural forms.2
This book contributes to these debates by seeking to trace another kind of ‘sea path’: the cultural narratives forged by, through and around the sea. The impulse to represent the sea is resonant across historical periods and cultures, and has inspired a varied corpus of ‘sea narratives’ encompassing letters, diaries, films, newspapers, novels, poems, plays, scientific and political documents, material artefacts and travel writing. These forms have captured the diverse ways in which humans interact with the sea, from representing it as a space of danger and the unknown, a space of possibility and potential, and a site of conflict and contest. In studies to date, sea narratives have often been drawn upon in historical and cultural criticism, providing a rich resource for understanding the diverse relationships between humans and the sea; others have studied the idea of narrative by taking a distinct genre—the novel, poetry, travel writing—and explored the sea’s effects upon its development. But none have sought to take a cross-genre and cross-cultural perspective that centres the very question of what is a sea narrative. In what ways does it make sense to speak of the ‘sea narrative’ as a form? What draws together this diverse corpus of material and makes it distinctive? And how might we better understand and conceptualise the relationship between narrative and the sea: how do narratives not only represent the sea, but also find their very forms shaped, challenged, reinvented, in the process?
This collection starts from the impulse to foreground the relationship between the sea and cultural narration; it seeks to centre this as the focal point of, rather than the backdrop to, its enquiry. It investigates the sea narrative across a variety of modes of cultural production, and explores both the diverse ways in which the sea has been narrated, and the ways in which the sea has, in turn, had a demonstrable effect upon—shaped, challenged, reinvented—those narrative modes too. From inter- and cross-disciplinary perspectives, covering a range of geographical spaces and historical periods, this collection argues that the sea stimulates innovative modes of narration that, in various ways, foreground the process of narrating the sea as central to their representation.
To this end, the chapters that follow have been selected for the perspectives they pose on the very idea of the sea narrative, and what this tells us more broadly about the relationship between the sea and cultural production. Some of the chapters here discern the ways in which writers generate new textual strategies to narrate unfamiliar encounters at sea; they identify the persistence and adaptation of longstanding mythologies of the sea; and they read specific sea spaces that constitute rich points of intersection within narratives. Others consider the impact of different sea spaces—ports, beaches, ships—as effecting the move into liminal narrative sites, or figure the sea as an imaginative ‘space beyond’ the land where ideas are projected and coalesce into new discursive configurations.
In what follows of this introduction, I explore the two intersecting facets of this collection’s exploration of ‘culture’: the relationship between the sea narrative and modes of cultural production; and reading sea narratives in (trans)national contexts. From this assessment, the idea of the sea narrative that this collection works with will be traced, along with the ways in which it contributes to a growing body of scholarly work that has assessed the relationship between the sea and culture.
What Is a Sea Narrative? Cultural Production and the Sea
The relationship between the sea and culture has risen to prominence in social and cultural criticism over the last 20 years or so; as Kären Wigen succinctly writes, ‘No longer outside time, the sea is being given a history, even as the history of the world is being retold from the perspective of the sea.’3 From the standpoint of social geography, scholars have moved to assert the sea as a socially constructed space—‘simultaneously an arena wherein social conflicts occur and a space shaped by these conflicts’—and have sought, like Philip Steinberg, to construct ‘a holistic geographical accounting of human interactions with the sea’ that understands the ‘ocean as a space that, like land, shapes and is shaped by social and physical processes’.4 A holistic geography of the kind that Steinberg calls for thus starts from the premise of understanding the sea as a space that is not just used by society but that figures as an interactive component within it. So too does this invite a nuanced understanding of the role of cultural representation, recognising that the cultural sphere does not simply reflect ideas about the sea, but actively shapes and reconfigures what the ocean is: as Steinberg writes, ‘the stories we tell about the sea […] contribute to the ocean assemblage’.5
The symbiotic relationship between the sea and culture is incisively established in seminal works by Barry Cunliffe and John Mack, whose far-reaching studies take into account a broad fabric of human existence, the social and spatial, as it resonates within and across sea and land. Cunliffe’s expansive consideration of 8000 years of human history along the Atlantic coast enquired into the interactions of physical, human and cultural geographies, and initiated questions about how cultures have historically perceived the ocean and shaped their identities around it.6 Mack’s more recent cultural history of the sea has explored ‘the variety of ways in which people “inhabit” the sea’; how human beings ‘interact because of it, navigate their course across it, live on and around it’.7 Mack writes that ‘the sea, then, is not a single conception but often has a kind of cultural geography associated with its construction’.8 Continuing in this vein, scholars such as David Lambert and Miles Ogborn have headed a burgeoning field of historical geographies of the sea that seeks to rethink the subject from the perspective of the ocean.9
If such works have established a framework for considering the relationship between the sea and culture, then others have focused more specifically on the resonances of the sea in particular spheres of cultural production. The field of travel writing research has contributed much to this discussion with richly interdisciplinary and typically transnational studies of sea-writings in diverse oceanic contexts; studies of regions such as the Pacific, for example, have shown how the writing of exploration and discovery narrated and created the sea through discursive contexts of science and observation.10 This is complemented by literary works such as Margaret Cohen’s The Novel and The Sea (2012), one of several books to hone in upon the relationship between the sea and literature, her work charting a novelistic trajectory of sea adventure fiction, while in Sea-Mark: The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton (1997), Philip Edwards has shown how the metaphor of the voyage resonates throughout Renaissance literature; Bernhard Klein’s Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture (2002) also provides a rich contribution to the field in exploring the connections between literature and other sea-writings that have shaped British histories of the sea.11 The visual arts also provide a rich resource, with a focus on how art is ‘not merely illustrative but constitutive’ of core thematic ideas about the sea, while in the sphere of film and TV studies work on sea spaces such as the shoreline has shown how such sites can have a ‘narrative, aesthetic and ideological significance’.12
These works establish a productive framework for thinking about the relationship between the sea and culture. So too have they established a familiarity with the historical trajectory of the sea’s cultural presence, and the persistent tropes that recur throughout cultural representations of the sea—tropes which influence and are contributed to by the chapters that follow, and thus bear initial consideration here. The starting point of many social and cultural studies of the sea has been the recognition that, for much of Western history, the sea has featured as unknown and mysterious, viewed from the land as an ‘othered’, often feared space: Mack writes that ‘the sea was as much somewhere to be endured as somewhere to be explored in the quest for distant coasts and passages’, and Alain Corbin has shown that until around 1750, the sea and its beaches were sites of repulsion and fear.13 The novelty and wonder of early explorations, as well as the turn to divine agency to make sense of new sights, is evident in Michael Harrigan’s chapter in this collection on early modern French voyages in the Atlantic. Meanwhile the early nineteenth-century narratives of war captivity that Elodie Duché discusses here are located within a conceptualisation of the sea as a space to be feared, Duché noting that this nourished the cultural appetite for stories of capture at sea.
Over time, fear of the ocean shifted to a more benign, empty imagining of the sea as a ‘great void’ beyond human society, merely an empty or blank space to be crossed—epitomised in the oft-quoted lines from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, where the sea appears as ‘a perfect and absolute blank!’14 Many of the chapters here gesture towards the ways in which historically, the sea has been idealised as an empty space where new ideas can be forged away from land. This is a theme which emerges most strongly in Eva-Maria Stolberg’s chapter, providing an account of the persistence of the great void in the narration of the Russian Arctic; here the sea appears as a blank space that can be crafted as ‘a cultural metaphor for explorers’ dreams’, a meeting point between ideas of ecology, technology and human progress. This and other contributions in this volume show the sea to be, as in the epigraph to this chapter, ‘a closely woven tapestry of lines’, full of sea paths that constitute its rich and vital presence.
If the sea and the land were historically positioned as separate from one another, then the coast has figured as a liminal, transitional space: ‘an in-between space in an in-between space’, as Dening writes, and Mack concurs that ‘the beach is an ambiguous place […] it is a neutral space, neither properly terrestrial nor yet thoroughly maritime, awaiting a metamorphic role’.15 The coast, as Anna R...