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...
With long, solitary periods at sea, far from literary and cultural centers, sailors comprise a remarkable population of readers and writers. Although ...
"William Ray's Barbary captivity narrative takes us on a wide-ranging journey through genres and geographies: from Philadelphia to North Africa, in prose and in poetry, Ray narrates the remarkable history of his experiences as a sailor, prisoner, and keen political observer during the Tripolitan War. This superb edition of Ray's text marks a key contribution to the genre of the captivity narrative in early American literature and provides a window onto an important historical episode of the early national period-namely, the earliest military encounters between the United States and Islamic...
"William Ray's Barbary captivity narrative takes us on a wide-ranging journey through genres and geographies: from Philadelphia to North Africa, in pr...
American literary studies has undergone a series of field redefinitions over the past two decades that have been consistently described as "turns," whether transnational, hemispheric, postnational, spatial, temporal, postsecular, aesthetic, or affective. In Turns of Event, Hester Blum and a splendid roster of contributors explore the conditions that have produced such movements. Offering an overview of the state of the study of nineteenth-century American literature, Blum contends that the field's propensity to turn, to reinvent itself constantly without dissolution, is one of its...
American literary studies has undergone a series of field redefinitions over the past two decades that have been consistently described as "turns,"...
