Search Results

This chapter considers Auden's longer poems, especially The Sea and the Mirror, with reference to his ideas about sympathy and theological belief. It demonstrates how Auden's concerns about Freudian developmental theories of emotion and sympathy affected his formal choices, particularly his use of allusion and rhyme. Formerly unnoticed allusions to Henry James's writing in Auden's poetry are explored. Chapter 3 counters post-structuralist readings of later Auden demonstrating that this repeated use of allusion has a theological intent.

This chapter examines Jack London's denunciation of what he perceived was America's cruel social conditions by offering his own life story as a case study in the novel Martin Eden. In 1909, Jack and Charmian London began the homeward voyage from Hawaii and the South Seas. Nearly completed, Martin Eden was to be published in the fall, and Jack thought the new novel was the best he had ever written. However, the book received negative reviews from critics. This chapter considers London's reaction to Martin Eden's poor critical reception as well as his dispute with eugenicist and ichthyologist David Starr Jordan over the poem, “The Man with a Hoe,” composed by a schoolteacher named Edwin Markham. It also discusses London's use of his fiction, including the novels The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf, to draw public empathy for his campaign for social change.

This chapter examines how Langston Hughes writes an autobiography as a literary genre. There were substantial pressures on a black autobiographer in the United States to construct himself as a subject that would represent African Americans in just the right ways: as valued citizens and loyal patriots. Hughes faced this issue not just in The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder As I Wander (1956). This chapter analyzes the link between heterolingualism and Hughes' autobiographies. To this end, it weaves together texts and a host of intertexts, including the Spanish translations of Hughes' autobiographies, around scenes of translation. It shows how the historical exigencies impinging on Hughes' acts of self-writing are intertwined with broader theoretical concerns about autobiography as a literary genre. The chapter also considers the discourses of race, gender, and nationality as well as black internationalism and international modernism that Hughes takes to task in his autobiographies.

The chapter focuses on human-environment relations. It begins with a description of how place names are used during a fishing trip, and how they are marked in digital GPS chartplotters and discussed amongst fishermen. Most of the names discussed are of places at sea not marked by anything visible from the sea’s surface. An account of the working day of a trawler fisherman shows how the intensive sociability of fishing skippers transcends their isolation on different boats. Discussions among skippers are focussed on the material results and affordances of fishing in places and names are generated in these discussions, reflecting Marnie’ Holborow’s Marxist analysis of language. The chapter builds on Tim Ingold’s analysis of place by demonstrating that place names reflect subjective the experience of working in them, as well as searing events of social history and changing fishing practices. An examination of places that are remembered but no longer in use shows that the same location can become a different place. The chapter concludes by emphasising how places are generated through conversations amongst people involved in developing their affordances, and how names for places incorporate many aspects of life experience and resonate through collective social experience.

This chapter is dedicated to broken flyers (those disabled or disfigured in combat), flawed flyers (those with psychological problems), and false flyers (men who passed themselves off as airmen to facilitate their nefarious purposes, as spies or sexual predators). In contrast to the image of the carefree, debonair flyer which had so captivated the public, it deals with darker imaginings of the men in blue, whether real or fictionalized. It presents the badly burnt airman William Simpson, who is spurned by his wife at first sight of his grotesquely misshapen face; the emotionally stunted ex-fighter pilot Freddie Page in Terence Rattigan's play The Deep Blue Sea; and Neville Heath, the sadistic serial killer who passed himself off as a dashing wartime group captain.

Key aspects of the history, social relations and economy of the west of Scotland, particularly the area around the Isle of Skye and Lochalsh. The market pressures that lead to deaths at sea are outlined, and the book’s labour-centred approach to analysis is introduced. The book’s content is situated in both phenomenological and political economy approaches to anthropological analysis. It is also situated historically in the development of capitalism, waged labour and fisheries on the west coast of Scotland and anthropological studies of Scotland and the sea. Finally, the introduction outlines the details of sea-centered approach to ethnographic fieldwork that the book is based on, and the opportunities and limitations this afforded.

The final substantive chapter explores the structural violence in the fishing industry. The circumstances of the wreck of the fishing boat Kathryn Jane and the death of her crew are examined in detail, along with the effect of the wreck and deaths on other fishers. The logic of seamanship meant taking the time and care to stay safe at sea, yet the logic of the market pressurised fishers to catch as quickly as possible and created incentives to fish in dangerous conditions. Fishers experience structural violence, with a fatality rate 115 times higher than the average workforce – but this was not recognised by fishers or government agencies. Instead, an ideology of nature naturalised deaths on a dangerous sea, and an ideology of accidents blamed fishermen for their own deaths. Fishers themselves coped with the deaths of their friends and workmates by isolating each event and ‘not keeping score’. Fishers and other seafarers were sometimes traumatised by these experiences. Ecological systems produced by capitalism include structural violence.

When Walcott arrived at the University of the West Indies, he had already achieved precocious success both as a poet and as a playwright, but he had yet to evolve a fully mature style in either role — notwithstanding the promise evident in the best moments of the two earliest books of poetry and of Henri Christophe. For the most part, Walcott's greatest accomplishments during his Jamaican residence came in his plays. By the time he moved to Port of Spain and started the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, he had written two of his best: The Sea at Dauphin (1954) and Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1957). Especially productive was the transitional period of 1957–1959, from the first Rockefeller-sponsored trip to the United States and Canada to his decision to live in Trinidad. This chapter focuses on The Sea at Dauphin and the official and unofficial products of the Rockefeller commission: Drums and Colours and Ti-Jean and His Brothers.

Curtiz directed The Sea Hawk, an epic swashbuckler starring Errol Flynn. Shot on the studio’s Stage 21, which could be flooded with water and included two hydraulically operated ship sets, the picture was personally crafted by Curtiz, who shot unauthorized action scenes instead of relying on stock footage that Hal Wallis wanted to use. The picture was a smash, although Flynn had become increasingly upset about his typecasting and working with Curtiz. Also explored is a famous Curtiz anecdote that illustrates the director’s total focus on realism and disregard for the safety of performers. After a whirlwind trip to New York City, Curtiz directed the notoriously inaccurate Santa Fe Trail, with Flynn and de Havilland, and an outstanding version of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, starring Edward G. Robinson, Ida Lupino, and John Garfield. Curtiz and Flynn had a final falling-out during Dive Bomber, a Technicolor tribute to the aerial navy. Flynn physically attacked the director, and the pair never worked together again.Although bereft of Warner’s top male star, Curtiz would move on to his greatest films as World War II began.

This chapter’s main subject is Milestone’s extensive preparatory work on a film about life in the USSR: Red Square. In 1933, he traveled to Russia and conferred in Europe with Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg about adapting his novel The Life and Downfall of Nikolai Kurbov for the screen. But Columbia Studios cancelled the contract, partly because of changing U.S.-Soviet relations and anxiety about Communism. The chapter’s final section focuses on the comedies The Captain Hates the Sea (a comedy set on an ocean liner starring matinee idol John Gilbert), Paris in the Spring (starring Ida Lupino), and his film of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes (starring Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman).

Introduction to John Barrymore and his masterful achievements on the stage in the early 1920s. Warners lures him to Hollywood in 1925with athree picture deal that he considers too lucrative to pass up. Spying Dolores from Jack Warner’s office, he casts her on the spot as his leading lady in The Sea Beast. While Maurice remains in New York trying to save enough money to pay his way west, Jack and Dolores’s romance blossoms under the wary but welcoming eye of Mae Costello. Barrymore yields happily to Mae’s mothering as the family awaits Maurice’simminent arrival.

This afterword offers the first critical account of Theo Angelopoulos' final, unfinished film, The Other Sea, describing it as the capstone to a long career and arguing that it would have synthesised many of the lifelong concerns and stylistic singularities that defined Angelopoulos' modernist cinema. The Other Sea was to be Angelopoulos' concluding film for the trilogy that began with The Weeping Meadow (2003) and continued with The Dust of Time (2008), but production stopped due to Angelopoulos' untimely death. Here the author shares both the nature of this unfinished odyssey and his personal experience with this tragically interrupted project. He first emphasises the importance of ‘unfinished’ and ‘interrupted’ to Angelopoulos' filmmaking before discussing The Other Sea's screenplay and production. He concludes by asking whether The Other Sea will be completed as a film.

This chapter discusses nation as a subject of maritime narratives. Maritime endeavors play an important role in the nation’s economic, military, and spatial development. Timely national issues within antebellum maritime narratives, however, extend far beyond concerns of military naval power proper and mainland expansion. The chapter examines two influential nineteenth-century maritime historical romances: Walter Scott ’s The Pirate and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea to explain the concept of national identification. Both romances dramatize scenes of national identification and exclusion in historical settings contiguous to the creation of their respective contemporary moments.

The chapter traces the story of a husband who killed and ate his wife in Virginia during the starving time, and places it in conjunction with the commonplace of “never marrying as if you were going to Virginia.” It analyzes Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, in which Moll’s warning against choosing a wife in haste is couched in cannibalistic imagery; Jonson, Chapman, and Marston’s Eastward Ho!, in which a ritual feast for Virginia-bound voyagers threatens to turn into both a rape and a cannibal slaughter; and Massinger and Fletcher’s The Sea Voyage, where both shipwrecked gallants and women turn to cannibalism. The chapter considers how, following the 1622 “Indian massacre,” the rhetoric of cannibalism came to be grafted onto the figure of the Indian, while the marriage dyad became a guarantee of the colony’s survival rather than a source of anxiety about whether it would consume itself.

This chapter examines the ways early nineteenth century authors framed piracy as an instrument of state growth, anti-colonial resistance, as well as a rationale for imperial expansion and intervention in the Americas in William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee (1835), John Brougham’s 1857 play Columbus, El Filibustero!, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover: A Tale (1829) and The Water Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas (1830), as well as El Filibustero: Novela Historica (1864), written by Yucatec author Eligio Ancona. In a climate of rapid national expansion, nineteenth century authors used the pirate as a central character to plot national(ist) narratives. Given piracy’s relationship to both state-building and anti-colonial enterprises, as well as piracy’s capacity to both facilitate and threaten property ownership, piracy helps us understand the radical and repressive regimes of American power. The historical novels examined in this chapter are interested in the shadowy origins of the American nation-state, as much as they are with the potentially conflicted present and future of these nation-states.

In this chapter, the life, work and philosophy of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima are explored. It is argued that the most interesting and profound properties of Mishima’s thought, his writings, and of the films associated with his thought and writings, are those that leave us with a sense of the open-ended struggle involved in his effort to define himself. The chapter examines some of Mishima’s most important literary works – including Confessions of a Mask, Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Patriotism, and The Sea of Fertility – as well as cinematic interpretations of these works by directors such as Paul Schrader, Lewis John Carlino, and Yukio Mishima himself. It is concluded that for Mishima, the defeat of nihilism was ultimately realized in his suicide by ritual seppuku.

This chapter demonstrates that the concept of feedback—as a technological condition, historical ontology, and theoretical frame—challenges traditional ways of conceiving of religion and writing its history. This essay dwells within 1920's America, a moment when the capacity of machines to regulate both nonhuman and human systems reached a point of critical mass and intensity. The chapter addresses responses to this changing technological atmosphere among Anglo-Protestant leaders, American Dada, as well as leaders of the infamous “Revival” of Herman Melville and his long-forgotten Moby-Dick (1851). Historically, the chapter demonstrates how Protestant strategies of self-centering, so pervasive in the early twentieth century, failed to contain the billowing nature of feedback technology. Theoretically, the chapter argues that the principle of feedback allows us to redefine religion not as something primarily ideological—that is, not exclusively about ideas, beliefs, creeds, nor simply as some lived extension or revision of such ideas, beliefs, and creeds. The chapter concludes by arguing that attention to feedback pushes us to consider that religion is not about the freedom to believe but rather about the possibilities that condition our unbelief.

This chapter focuses on James Fenimore Cooper's second book The Spy. It explains that this book was a tale of national origins and suggests that his designs on the English reading public indicates that he was imitating the larger outlines of Walter Scott's career. It analyzes how Cooper actually wrote and produced The Spy in 1820 and 1821 and how he settled on its subject. This chapter also considers Cooper's work in writing book reviews for Charles K. Gardner and the completion of this next novel The Sea Lions.