This book investigates the highly engaging topic of the literary and cultural significance of ‘sailor talk.’ The central argument is that sailor talk offers a way of rethinking the figure of the nineteenth-century sailor and sailor-writer, whose language articulated the rich, layered, and complex culture of sailors in port and at sea. From this argument many other compelling threads emerge, including questions relating to the seafarer’s multifaceted identity, maritime labor, questions of performativity, the ship as ‘theater,’ the varied and multiple registers of ‘sailor talk,’...