Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600 Present

Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600 Present

Charlotte Mathieson Editor Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600 Present

Editor Charlotte Mathieson Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom ISBN 978-1-137-58115-0 ISBN 978-1-137-58116-7 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58116-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016940204 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This collection of essays began with the Sea Narratives symposium held by the Travel and Mobility Studies Network at the University of Warwick, Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), in January 2014. Thanks are due to the IAS for funding the network from 2012 to 2015, and to co-organisers Dr Loredana Polezzi and Dr Tara Puri for their work on the network and this event. The original symposium generated highly interesting and engaging debate on the topic of Sea Narratives, and established a clear niche for a collection on the theme. Three of the six original presenters from the conference were able to develop their papers for publication here, and they are joined by six additional essays that speak to the themes of the day. I would like to thank all of the contributors for their hard work on their papers. Thanks also go to Palgrave Macmillan for supporting the publication, and to the anonymous reviewer whose illustrative feedback helped shape the final book. The editor and contributors are grateful for the kind permission of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; National Library of South Africa; and Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, for reproduction of images that appear in Chaps. 3 and 4. v

CONTENTS 1 Introduction: The Literature, History and Culture of the Sea, 1600 Present 1 Charlotte Mathieson 2 A Need to Narrate? Early Modern French Accounts of Atlantic Crossings 23 Michael Harrigan 3 A Sea of Stories : Maritime Imagery and Imagination in Napoleonic Narratives of War Captivity 47 Elodie Duché 4 Through Dustless Tracks for African Rights: Narrative Currents and Political Imaginaries of Solomon Plaatje s 1914 Sea Voyage 81 Janet Remmington 5 From Icy Backwater to Nuclear Waste Ground : The Russian Arctic Ocean in the Twentieth Century 111 Eva-Maria Stolberg vii

viii CONTENTS 6 Shores of History, Islands of Ireland: Chronotopes of the Sea in the Contemporary Irish Novel 139 Roberta Gefter Wondrich 7 Women at Sea: Locating and Escaping Gender on the Cornish Coast in Daphne du Maurier s The Loving Spirit and Frenchman s Creek 171 Gemma Goodman 8 Travelling Across Worlds and Texts in A. S. Byatt s Sea Narratives 195 Barbara Franchi 9 Unveiling the Anthropo(s)cene: Burning Seas, Cinema of Mourning and the Globalisation of Apocalypse 217 Sayandeb Chowdhury 10 The Tolerant Coast 239 Isaac Land Index 261

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Sayandeb Chowdhury is an Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi. He is also PhD Fellow at the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Calcutta. He was UKNA Research Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden between April and July 2015. His research and teaching interests are in colonial and postcolonial visual forms, modernism and postmodernism in Europe, literary theory, and the idea of the City. He has contributed articles to Film International, Journal of South Asian History and Culture, South Asia Review, European Journal of English Studies. Elodie Duché is a Lecturer in Modern History at York St John University. She was appointed Alan Pearsall Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Historical Research (University of London) for 2014 2015, after completing a doctoral thesis at the University of Warwick on Napoleonic experiences of captivity. She has recently published an article on transnational charity networks for prisoners of war as part of a special issue on war captivity in Napoleonica. La Revue edited by François Houdecek and Alexander Mikaberidze. She has also published on gender and matrimony in war captivity in Catherine Exley s Diary: The Life and Times of an Army Wife in the Peninsular War, ed. Rebecca Probert (2014). She co-founded the Prisoner of War Studies Network. Barbara Franchi is a doctoral candidate in the School of English, University of Kent. Her research examines strategies of intertextuality and ekphrasis in A. S. Byatt s fiction, in relation to five crucial discourses in the novelist s oeuvre: geographical dichotomies, war narratives, science, visual arts and literary creativity. Her further research interests include Victorian and neo-victorian literature, the novel form, feminist and queer theory, and fairy tales. She has co-edited Feminist Perspectives Across the Board: Analyses and Approaches (December 2014), a special issue for Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest. ix

x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Gemma Goodman is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. Her research focuses on literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century that is set in Cornwall, particularly in relation to the economic and cultural shift from mining to tourism. She has published on writers including Salome Hocking, Jack Clemo, Charles Lee and Daphne du Maurier. She is co-editor of Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840 1920, published in 2014. Michael Harrigan is a Teaching Fellow in French Politics and Society at the University of Bath, His research focuses on the literature of intercultural encounter, especially in Renaissance and early modern France. This includes travel narratives, colonial representations, missionary accounts and representations of alterity in popular literature and theatre. He is particularly interested in questions of métissage, of narrative hybridity and circuits of knowledge in the encounter of Europe with Asia and the Americas. Recently completed articles deal with, respectively, the subject of métissage in the Indian Ocean basin, and the encounter of the sixteenthcentury French traveller Nicolas de Nicolay with Mediterranean economies (in Anthropological Reformations: Anthropology in the Era of Reformation (ed. Anne Eusterschulte and Hannah Wälzholz), 2015). He is also finishing an extensive study on the function and reception of narratives of slavery and servitude in the early modern period. Isaac Land is Associate Professor of History at Indiana State University (USA). He is the author of War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750 1850 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and writes The Coastal History Blog at the Port Towns and Urban Cultures website, http://porttowns.port.ac.uk/author/landi/. Charlotte Mathieson is a Teaching Fellow in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. She completed her PhD in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in 2011. Her research focuses on mobility and space in Victorian works by authors including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, and she has recently published Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Janet Remmington is a doctoral candidate in English and Related Literature at the University of York. She is currently working on an intellectual history project on black South African mobilities, c. 1850 2010, and as an editor of a forthcoming edited collection to mark 100 years since Sol Plaatje s landmark Native Life in South Africa. She has published in the Journal of Southern African Studies and Studies in Travel Writing. Eva-Maria Stolberg is Associate Professor in Russian and Global History at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). Dr Stolberg has developed an academic profile on Eurasia, East Asia and the Pacific. She has recently published The Soviet

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi Union and the United States: Rivals of the Twentieth Century (Frankfurt a.m. and New York, 2013) and is currently working on a book project, Russia and the World: Paths of Inclusion and Exclusion. Roberta Gefter Wondrich is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Trieste, Department of Humanities. She received a PhD in anglophone literatures from the Universities of Bologna and Trieste, is managing editor of Prospero, Rivista di letterature e culture straniere (a journal of foreign and comparative literatures and cultural studies). She has specialised in the field of Irish contemporary fiction, on which she has written a book ( Romanzi contemporanei d Irlanda: nazione e narrazioni da McGahern a McCabe, 2000) and many articles. Her field of interests includes the contemporary English and Irish novel, James Joyce and J. M. Coetzee.

LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Ship model in straw marquetry case crafted by a French prisoner in Britain, c.1804 1815 66 Opening excerpt of the newspaper article by Sol T. Plaatje, Native Congress Mission to England, Diamond Field Advertiser, 14 July 1914, p. 6 84 Opening excerpt of the newspaper article by Sol T. Plaatje, Native Delegation to England, Tsala ea Batho, 18 July 1914, p. 5 85 Members of the 1914 South African deputation (anticlockwise): Rev. W. B. Rubusana, Ph.D., T. M. Mapikela, Rev. John L. Dube, Sol Plaatje, and Saul Msane 92 Photograph of the Norseman taken from an early twentieth-century postcard 93 xiii