Maritime Modernism
Seas, Coasts and Islands in British and Irish Literature
Will be published approx. on 31. July 2026
Book
Hardback
248 pages
978-1-3995-5120-5 (ISBN)
Description
By tracing maritime settings and contexts across modernist literature in Britain and Ireland, Maritime Modernism: Water, Islands and Coasts in Modernist Literature of the British Isles reveals new connections between the period's key texts as well as evidence of how cultural and political relationships to water can differ significantly depending upon one's vantage point. While writers across the archipelago employed coastal, nautical and oceanic imagery to challenge the narratives and cartographies of maritime-imperial Britain, authors in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales also differ in the ways they imagine the sea/land relationship and its histories, against the backdrop of a devolving United Kingdom. Major authors such as Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and W.B. Yeats are studied alongside less well-known writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Lynette Roberts, David Jones, Neil Gunn and Claire Spencer.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
5 b&w illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-3995-5120-5 (9781399551205)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Nels Pearson is Professor and Chair of English at Fairfield University, USA. He is the author of Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett (University Press of Florida, 2015), which was awarded the Donald J. Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book of 2015 by the American Conference for Irish Studies. He is the editor, with Marc Singer, of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (Ashgate, 2009).
Content
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Waterlands: Imperial Legacies and the Comparative Archipelago
1. Recovering Islands: Scotland, Ocean and Archipelago in To the Lighthouse
2. Celtic Hydrology: Water and the British Littoral from D.H. Lawrence to David Jones
3. 'Oed' und leer das Meer': T.S. Eliot's Island Culture
4. 'the invulnerable tide': Water, Nation, and Nature in W.B. Yeats
5. James Joyce, Ireland, and Oceanic Double Consciousness
6. 'A dream of far sea surge': Water as Place in Neil Gunn
7. A Tragedy of Figure and Ground: Claire Spencer's The Island
Conclusion: Elizabeth Bowen and the Hyphenated Archipelago
Works Cited
Introduction: Waterlands: Imperial Legacies and the Comparative Archipelago
1. Recovering Islands: Scotland, Ocean and Archipelago in To the Lighthouse
2. Celtic Hydrology: Water and the British Littoral from D.H. Lawrence to David Jones
3. 'Oed' und leer das Meer': T.S. Eliot's Island Culture
4. 'the invulnerable tide': Water, Nation, and Nature in W.B. Yeats
5. James Joyce, Ireland, and Oceanic Double Consciousness
6. 'A dream of far sea surge': Water as Place in Neil Gunn
7. A Tragedy of Figure and Ground: Claire Spencer's The Island
Conclusion: Elizabeth Bowen and the Hyphenated Archipelago
Works Cited