The Imaginary Sea Voyage

The Imaginary Sea Voyage
Author: James J. Bloom
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Adventure and adventurers in literature
ISBN: 9780786465255

For centuries, humankind has wondered what is ""out there"" and has embarked on countless voyages to find out. This book traces the history and literature of the imaginary voyage - stories of mariners journeying through uncharted waters to find strange and marvelous sights. Through the overlapping spheres of history, geography, cosmography and literary criticism, this book examines the mystique of what lies just over the horizon.

The Sea Voyage Narrative

The Sea Voyage Narrative
Author: Robert Foulke
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2013-10-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135366365

From The Odyssey to Moby Dick to The Old Man and the Sea, the long tradition of sea voyage narratives is comprehensively explained here supported by discussions of key texts.

Sea Monsters

Sea Monsters
Author: Joseph Nigg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2014-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226925188

The mythic creature expert and author of Phoenix takes readers through a bestiary of sea monsters featured on the famous 16th century map Carta Marina. In the sixteenth century, sea serpents, giant man-eating lobsters, and other monsters were thought to swim the waters of Norther Europe, threatening seafarers who ventured too far from shore. Thankfully, Scandinavian mariners had Olaus Magnus, who in 1539 charted these fantastic marine animals in his influential map of the Nordic countries, the Carta Marina. In Sea Monsters, mythologist Joseph Nigg brings readers face-to-face with these creatures and other magnificent components of Magnus’s map. Nearly two meters wide in total, the map’s nine wood-block panels comprise the largest and first realistic portrayal of the region. But in addition to its important geographic significance, Magnus’s map goes beyond cartography to scenes both domestic and mystic. Close to shore, Magnus shows humans interacting with common sea life—boats struggling to stay afloat, merchants trading, children swimming, and fisherman pulling lines. But from the offshore deeps rise some of the most terrifying sea creatures imaginable—like sea swine, whales as large as islands, and the Kraken. In this book, Nigg draws on Magnus’s own text to further describe and illuminate these inventive scenes and to flesh out the stories of the monsters. Sea Monsters is a stunning tour of a world that still holds many secrets for us land dwellers, who will forever be fascinated by reports of giant squid and the real-life creatures of the deep that have proven to be as bizarre and otherworldly as we have imagined for centuries. It is a gorgeous guide for enthusiasts of maps, monsters, and the mythic. “[A] beautiful new exploration of the Carta Marina.”—Wired

Hemispheres and Stratospheres

Hemispheres and Stratospheres
Author: Roger D. Lund
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2020-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684482011

Hemispheres and Stratospheres offers eight essays that address the art, literature, science, and politics of distance during the long eighteenth century. This volume celebrates the intercontinental expansiveness of Enlightenment distance culture--a culture that continues to encourage modern pursuits such as space travel, tourism, telecommunication, multiculturalism, and international research collaboration.

Virtual Voyages

Virtual Voyages
Author: Paul Longley Arthur
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2011-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781843313182

'Virtual Voyages' is a fascinating account of the European discovery of the elusive 'great south land' told through the literature of 'imaginary voyages'. Written at the height of the era of European maritime exploration, these bizarre and captivating tales, with their wildly imaginative visions of antipodean inversion and strangeness, reveal a hidden history of attitudes to colonization. By exposing the relationship between myth and reality in the antipodes, this book casts new light on the power of fiction to influence history. In the post-colonial studies field, books about travel writing and empire have tended to focus on the high period of nineteenth-century imperialism and on the colonial settings of Africa and India. This book offers a fresh perspective by focussing on the eighteenth century, and referring to the geographical region of Australia and the Pacific, which has had far less attention. The book also breaks new ground by being the first to approach the genre of the imaginary voyage from a post-colonial perspective. In addition to the new insights into European colonialism that it offers, the book illustrates many broader themes in eighteenth-century history and thought. These include connections between the rise of science and modern imperialism, the development of narrative history and fiction and the influence of romanticism, the evolution of the early novel in Britain and France, and the role of mythology in the development of national identity.

The Sea in the Literary Imagination

The Sea in the Literary Imagination
Author: Ekaterina V. Kobeleva
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2019-01-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527524108

This collection explores nautical themes in a variety of literary contexts from multiple cultures. Including contributors from five continents, it emphasizes the universality of human experience with the sea, while focusing on literature that spans a millennium, stretching from medieval romance to the twenty-first-century reimagining of classic literary texts in film. These fresh essays engage in discussions of literature from the UK, the USA, India, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Colombia, and the Caribbean. Scholars of maritime literature will find the collection interesting for the unique insights it offers on individual literary texts, while general readers will be intrigued by the interconnectedness that it reveals in human experience with the sea.

The Weaver-god, He Weaves

The Weaver-god, He Weaves
Author: Christopher Sten
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 1996
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780873385374

In this book, the author sets out to dispel the idea that Melville was an author of raw genius who knew, or cared little, about the art of the novel. Rather, he shows how Melville not only knew about the novelist's craft, but also appropriated and transformed a series of distinct genres.

The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing

The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing
Author: Carl Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134105142

As many places around the world confront issues of globalization, migration and postcoloniality, travel writing has become a serious genre of study, reflecting some of the greatest concerns of our time. Encompassing forms as diverse as field journals, investigative reports, guidebooks, memoirs, comic sketches and lyrical reveries; travel writing is now a crucial focus for discussion across many subjects within the humanities and social sciences. An ideal starting point for beginners, but also offering new perspectives for those familiar with the field, The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing examines: Key debates within the field, including postcolonial studies, gender, sexuality and visual culture Historical and cultural contexts, tracing the evolution of travel writing across time and over cultures Different styles, modes and themes of travel writing, from pilgrimage to tourism Imagined geographies, and the relationship between travel writing and the social, ideological and occasionally fictional constructs through which we view the different regions of the world. Covering all of the major topics and debates, this is an essential overview of the field, which will also encourage new and exciting directions for study. Contributors: Simon Bainbridge, Anthony Bale, Shobhana Bhattacharji, Dúnlaith Bird, Elizabeth A. Bohls, Wendy Bracewell, Kylie Cardell, Daniel Carey, Janice Cavell, Simon Cooke, Matthew Day, Kate Douglas, Justin D. Edwards, David Farley, Charles Forsdick, Corinne Fowler, Laura E. Franey, Rune Graulund, Justine Greenwood, James M. Hargett, Jennifer Hayward, Eva Johanna Holmberg, Graham Huggan, William Hutton, Robin Jarvis, Tabish Khair, Zoë Kinsley, Barbara Korte, Julia Kuehn, Scott Laderman, Claire Lindsay, Churnjeet Mahn, Nabil Matar, Steve Mentz, Laura Nenzi, Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Manfred Pfister, Susan L. Roberson, Paul Smethurst, Carl Thompson, C.W. Thompson, Margaret Topping, Richard White, Gregory Woods.

Sailing the Pacific

Sailing the Pacific
Author: Miles Hordern
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2014-05-20
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1466871962

Solo sailors are widely known to be a breed apart, and here's an unforgettable book that shows just how wide a berth they give themselves from the crowds. Several years ago, Miles Hordern, a schoolteacher by training---though he had run away to sea a few times before---set sail on a twenty-eight-foot boat from New Zealand to South America, the largest uninterrupted stretch of water on earth, and into the dominion of icebergs, cyclones, and swells of monumental proportions. The trip would take him through the fjords of Patagonia, one of the last uncharted areas in the world, then north on the Peru Current before he began his homeward voyage. Sailing the Pacific recounts that trip in prose so vivid you can almost feel the spray sting your face and the deck heave beneath your feet. Here is prose so hawser-taut that it takes you back to Conrad, Melville, and Poe, indeed all those writers whose works about the bounding main have launched countless imaginations. Hordern pauses to consider those who have gone before him, recounting the stories that have given life to this lonely and magisterial part of the world. Writers, adventurers, fictional characters, cartographers, doomed voyages from history's pages—from the Whaleship S.S. Essex to the HMS Bounty: the South Pacific drew them all, and in their way they left mark on its vast surface. Part sailing yarn, part adventure story, part homage to an unending but beckoning horizon, Sailing the Pacific will appeal to the sailor in each one of us, whatever the way we choose to answer the ocean's call.