The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives - Softcover

Blum, Hester

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807858552 ISBN 13: 9780807858554

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008

Synopsis

With long, solitary periods at sea, far from literary and cultural centers, sailors comprise a remarkable population of readers and writers. Although their contributions have been little recognized in literary history, seamen were important figures in the nineteenth-century American literary sphere. In the first book to explore their unique contribution to literary culture, Hester Blum examines the first-person narratives of working sailors, from little-known sea tales to more famous works by Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Henry Dana.

In their narratives, sailors wrote about how their working lives coexisted with--indeed, mutually drove--their imaginative lives. Even at leisure, they were always on the job site. Blum analyzes seamen's libraries, Barbary captivity narratives, naval memoirs, writings about the Galapagos Islands, Melville's sea vision, and the crisis of death and burial at sea. She argues that the extent of sailors' literacy and the range of their reading were unusual for a laboring class, belying the popular image of Jack Tar as merely a swaggering, profane, or marginal figure. As Blum demonstrates, seamen's narratives propose a method for aligning labor and contemplation that has broader applications for the study of American literature and history.

About this title

Book Description

"Blum the rise of the sea narrative as a popular and nationalist literary form but also investigates the reading and writing practices of sailors themselves. Her attention to sailors' 'cultures of letters,' especially to issues of literacy, reading practices, and book making, is particularly valuable. This is an impressive, substantial, well-written book that engages a wide range of criticism and makes an important contribution to traces many fields in American studies."--Shelley S. Streeby, University of California, San Diego

From the Inside Flap

With long, solitary periods at sea, far from literary and cultural centers, sailors comprise a remarkable population of readers and writers. In the first book to explore their unique contribution to literary culture, Hester Blum examines the first-person narratives of 19th-century working sailors, from little-known sea tales to more famous works by Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Henry Dana. Blum argues that the extent of sailors' literacy and the range of their reading were unusual for a laboring class, belying the popular image of Jack Tar as merely a swaggering, profane, or marginal figure.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0807858552
• ISBN 13: 9780807858554
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288