To write about the sea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to do so against a vast accretion of past deeds, patterns of thought, and particularly patterns of expression, many of which had begun to feel not just settled but exhausted. The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language takes up this circumstance, showing how prose writers in this period grappled with the super-conventionalized nature of the sea as a setting, as a shaper of plot and character, as a structuring motif, and as a source of metaphor. But while writing about the sea required careful negotiation of multiple andsometimes conflicting associations, the sea's multiplicity and freight function not just as impediments to thought or expression but as sources of intellectual and expressive possibilities. The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language treats a provocatively diverse group of key authors spanning from the 1830s to the 1930s and including both those inextricably associated with the sea (Frederick Marryat, Joseph Conrad) and those whose writings are less obviously marine, such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Virginia Woolf. What these writers share, among other things, is that they simultaneously register and turn to account the difficulties that attend writing about, and writing with, the sea. In the process, their sea-writing sheds new light on the value of marginalized representational techniques including repetition, cliché, and imprecision.

This book shows how prose writers in the Victorian period grappled with the sea as a setting, a shaper of plot and character, as a structuring motif, and as a source of metaphor.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Britain's imperial power and influence was at its height. These were years of daring, when adventurers sounded the mysteries of the deep sea and the distant poles, aviators sped through the skies, and new media technologies transformed communication. They were years of social upheaval, during which long-suppressed voices – particularly those of women, of the labouring classes, and of colonial subjects – grew louder and demanded to be heard. They were years of violence, of insurrection and political agitation, and of imperial conflicts that would encompass continents. By subjecting specific developments in literature and related culture to a fine-grained and historically-informed analysis, British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age? explores the writing of this extraordinary period in all its complexity and vibrancy.

The Nation and British Literature and Culture charts the emergence of Britain as a political, social and cultural construct, examining the manner in which its constituent elements were brought together through a process of amalgamation and conquest. The fashioning of the nation through literature and culture is examined, as well as counter narratives that have sought to call national orthodoxies into question. Specific topics explored include the emergence of a distinctively national literature in the early modern period; the impact of French Revolution on conceptions of Britishness; portrayals of empire in popular and literary fiction; popular music and national imagining; the marginalisation and oppression of particular communities within the nation. The volume concludes by asking what implications an extended set of contemporary crises have for the ongoing survival both of the United Kingdom, both as a political unit and as a literary and cultural point of identity.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick’s enlightening and entertaining tour through Melville’s classic. As he did in his National Book Award–winning bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick brings a sailor’s eye and an adventurer’s passion to unfolding the story behind an epic American journey. He skillfully navigates Melville’s world and illuminates the book’s humor and unforgettable characters—finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and, indeed, to all times. An ideal match between author and subject, Why Read Moby-Dick? will start conversations, inspire arguments, and make a powerful case that this classic tale waits to be discovered anew. “Gracefully written [with an] infectious enthusiasm…”—New York Times Book Review

Man's complex relationship to planet Earth is explored in this second edition of the landmark anthology edited by Frank Rhodes and Bruce Malamud. This volume provides a portrait of the planet as experienced not just by scientists, but by artists, aviators, poets, philosophers, novelists, historians, and sociologists as well. A unique collection that bridges the gap between science and humanities Contains writings by scientists, artists, aviators, poets, philosophers, novelists, historians, and sociologists including Charles Darwin, Dane Picard, Rachel Carson, John Muir, Mark Twain and Archibald Geikie Represents the human experience over the centuries, covering a span of 2,500 years Reflects the planet's extraordinary physical diversity The previous edition was voted one of the 25 'Great Books of Geology' by readers of the Journal of Geological Education "...this is a very worthwhile read, with something for everyone interested in geography, earth systems and geology, natural history or the general environment." Robert A. Francis, King's College London, Progress in Physical Geography

During the nineteenth century, British and American naval supremacy spanned the globe. The importance of transoceanic shipping and trade to the European-based empire and her rapidly expanding former colony ensured that the ocean became increasingly important to popular literary culture in both nations. This collection of ten essays by expert scholars in transatlantic British and American literatures interrogates the diverse meanings the ocean assumed for writers, readers, and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic during this period of global exploration and colonial consolidation. The book’s introduction offers three critical lenses through which to read nineteenth-century Anglophone maritime literature: "wet globalization," which returns the ocean to our discourses of the global; "salt aesthetics," which considers how the sea influences artistic culture and aesthetic theory; and "blue ecocriticism," which poses an oceanic challenge to the narrowly terrestrial nature of "green" ecological criticism. The essays employ all three of these lenses to demonstrate the importance of the ocean for the changing shapes of nineteenth-century Anglophone culture and literature. Examining texts from Moby-Dick to the coral flower-books of Victorian Australia, and from Wordsworth’s sea-poetry to the Arctic journals of Charles Francis Hall, this book shows how important and how varied in meaning the ocean was to nineteenth-century Anglophone readers. Scholars of nineteenth-century globalization, the history of aesthetics, and the ecological importance of the ocean will find important scholarship in this volume.