Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture) by Matthew Ingleby & Matthew P M Kerr

About the Book

This volume examines the cultural importance of the coastline in Britain during a time of vast change.

Book Synopsis

Examines the cultural importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination
The long nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast, which could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation - a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production.
Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. The collection offers essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies and includes interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies, and cultural geography.
Key Features
Presents new essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studiesOffers interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geographyQuestions traditional scholarly period boundaries by spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries

From the Back Cover

'From Martello towers and mermaids to telegraph cables, Swahili chairs and the "invention" of Cannes, these fine, thought-provoking essays demonstrate just how largely the coast loomed in British nineteenth-century culture. Artists, writers, scientists, religious thinkers, politicians and the public were all drawn by the sea, which in turn shaped Britain's relationship with the world. A very able crew of distinguished scholars and rising stars navigates the uncharted waters and major cultural currents of Victorian age.' Fiona Stafford, University of Oxford The first book to examine the cultural importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination The long nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast, which could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation - a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production. Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. The collection offers essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies and includes interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography. Matthew Ingleby is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. Matthew P. M. Kerr is Lecturer in British Literature, 1837-1939, at the University of Southampton. Cover image: Violet and Blue: The Little Bathers, Pérosquérie, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1888. Oil on wood panel; 12.4 × 21.7 cm (4 7/8 × 8 9/16 in.) Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.178. Photo: Imaging Department (c) President and Fellows of Harvard College Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-3573-4 Barcode

Review Quotes

From Martello towers and mermaids to telegraph cables, Swahili chairs and the "invention" of Cannes, these fine, thought-provoking essays demonstrate just how largely the coast loomed in British nineteenth-century culture. Artists, writers, scientists, religious thinkers, politicians and the public were all drawn by the sea, which in turn shaped Britain's relationship with the world. A very able crew of distinguished scholars and rising stars navigates the uncharted waters and major cultural currents of Victorian age.-- "Fiona Stafford, University of Oxford"

On the natural environment, Matthew Ingleby and Matthew P. M. Kerr's Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, is an engaging and heterogenous collection of essays that offers surprising synergies. In the Victorian period, Britons fell in love with their own seaside. Ranging widely from art history, to poetry, to geology, to the histories of colonialism and commerce, these essays explore how Britons engaged with the littoral--Pamela K. Gilbert "Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 volume 59, issue 4"

Taken together, these essays provide an ambitious overview of how the coast was variously approached, repurposed, and revisited across the long nineteenth century. The interdisciplinary focus is vital to the interplay of visual and literary aesthetics with developing technologies, and this distinctive feature allows the volume to cover more ground than a monograph could realistically hope to do. Approaching the sea from the relative positions of juxtaposition, the surface, and even the submarine stands to remind us that, in researching nineteenth-century accounts of the coast, we should be constantly alive to the perspectives that these accounts spotlight, subsume, or choose to ignore.--Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton, Canterbury Christ Church University "Victorian Studies, 2019"

About the Author

Dr Matthew Ingleby is Lecturer in Victorian Studies in the Department of English, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Production of Bloomsbury: Novel Grounds (Palgrave, forthcoming 2018) and Bloomsbury (British Library Publishing, 2017).

Dr Matthew P. M. Kerr is Lecturer in British Literature, 1837 to 1939 at the University of Southampton. He is currently revising his first monograph, Boundless: The Language of the Sea and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (under consideration by Oxford University Press). His research appeared in several key journals in Victorian Studies.