The Lure of the Sea: Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750-1840, The - Softcover

Corbin, Alain

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140247998 ISBN 13: 9780140247992

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1995

Synopsis

This wonderful book explores the dramatic change in Western attitude toward the sea and seaside pleasures that occurred between 1750 and 1840. Interest in travel; the arrival of landscape painting, geology, and natural theology; fashions in medicine and the advent of the bathing-machine; the emergence of Romanticism and the Sublime—these are only some of the elements that helped transform perceptions.
 
There was no sea in the Garden of Eden, and for centuries the Earth’s ocean was looked upon with hostility, as a chaotic remnant of the flood. But by the time Jane Austen wrote Sandition—perhaps the first ‘seaside’ novel—in 1817, the sea and shore had come to be viewed as something intensely and sensuously pleasurable, with beach holidays all the rage in new resorts from Brighton and Scarborough to Dieppe.
 
“A compact and brilliant taxonomy of the shifting meanings of the sea and shore.”—The New York Review of Books

About this title

From the Back Cover

Alain Corbin's wonderful book explores the dramatic change in Western attitude towards the sea and seaside pleasures that occurred between 1750 and 1840. Interest in travel; the arrival of landscape painting, geology and natural theology; fashions in medicine and the advent of the bathing-machine; the emergence of Romanticism and the Sublime - these are only some of the elements that helped transform perceptions. By the time Jane Austen wrote Sanditon - perhaps the first 'seaside' novel - in 1817, the sea and shore had come to be viewed as something intensely and sensuously pleasurable, with beach holidays all the rage in new resorts from Brighton and Scarborough to Dieppe.

About the Author

Alain Corbin is Professor of Modern History at the University of Paris I, Sorbonne and the author of The Foul and the Fragrant (1986).

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140247998
• ISBN 13: 9780140247992
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400