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What is the ocean’s role in human and planetary history? How have writers, sailors, painters, scientists, historians, and philosophers from across time and space poetically envisioned the oceans and depicted human entanglements with the sea? In order to answer these questions, Søren Frank covers an impressive range of material in A Poetic History of the Oceans: Greek, Roman and Biblical texts, an Icelandic Saga, Shakespearean drama, Jens Munk’s logbook, 19th century-writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Jules Michelet, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Jonas Lie, and Joseph Conrad as well as their 20th and 21st century-heirs like J. G. Ballard, Jens Bjørneboe, and Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen.
A Poetic History of the Oceans promotes what Frank labels an amphibian comparative literature and mobilises recent theoretical concepts and methodological developments in Blue Humanities, Blue Ecology, and New Materialism to shed new light on well-known texts and introduce readers to important, but lesser-known Scandinavian literary engagements with the sea.
A Poetic History of the Oceans promotes what Frank labels an amphibian comparative literature and mobilises recent theoretical concepts and methodological developments in Blue Humanities, Blue Ecology, and New Materialism to shed new light on well-known texts and introduce readers to important, but lesser-known Scandinavian literary engagements with the sea.
Price: $150.00
Pages: 448
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Publication Date:
14 July 2022
ISBN: 9789004426696
Format: Hardcover
“This is a book that deserves to be read for its ambitions. Based on his comprehensive reading close to erudition within the field of maritime literary studies, Søren Frank sets out to reframe the somewhat marginalised genre of the maritime novel, yet also other forms of prose as well as visual material. With a detailed argument for the symptomatic significance of the maritime perspective in literary history the author zooms in on three dimensions […] His overall aim is to incorporate the so-called blue ecology as an integral part of the otherwise terrestrial focus that dominates today's preoccupation with ecological issues in art, culture and politics.”
- Svend Erik Larsen, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, Denmark, DK in Orbis Litterarum, 2022.
"Combining a capacious vision of the long history of oceanic narratives in Western culture with incisive analysis of recent scholarship in the “blue humanities,” A Poetic History of the Oceans provides an excellent overview of oceanic literature and culture. At this book’s core lies a brilliant reading of Moby-Dick as model for four distinct historical iterations of Western imaginations of the sea. In reading Melville’s novel as simultaneously theocentric, anthropocentric, technocentric, and geocentric, Frank shows how this American classic opens onto global vistas. Beyond an innovative analysis of the English-language canon, however, this book also brings Scandinavian writers and texts forward into their rightful places as oceanic pioneers. The introduction of figures such as Jens Munk, Jonas Lie, Martin Andersen Nexø, and Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen suggests how much scholars and readers can learn from this book."
- Steve Mentz, Professor of English, St. John's University, New York, USA.
“A Poetic History of the Oceans has compelling qualities: a fascinating topic, incredible erudition, an innovative, wide-ranging approach, and a seductive, reader-friendly style. The quality of the scholarship is remarkable, both concerning the works examined and the thinkers and literary critics that are consulted and cited. Given the superb treatment of the topic, the wealth of information, and the theoretical insights, Frank’s book could very well become a classic in its field.”
- Thomas Pavel, Professor of Romance Languages, Comparative Literature, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, USA.
"A Poetic History of the Oceans is intended primarily for literary historians and literary scholars, but it is also essential reading for anyone interested in notions of the sea and the oceanic imagination. Søren Frank's main ambition is to write a history of Western maritime literature and culture, what he calls an oceanic literature, and at the same time to contribute to research on this literature. He succeeds in this with clarity and erudition."
- Sylvain Briens in Norsk litteraturvitenskapelig tidsskrift, vol. 26, no. 2, 2023, pp. 147–149. Review translated from Swedish.
“Ultimately, the primary advantage for archaeologists wading through Frank’s highly ambitious volume is exposure to numerous theoretical positions, each of which offers relevant perspectives for thinking with maritime material culture, and maritime worlds more broadly. Each theme’s theoretical set is written in an accessible manner, citing and summarizing key sources, before running that set parallel to the literary works in question.”
- Sara A. Rich, “International Journal of Nautical Archaeology”, 52:2, 469, 2023. DOI: 10.1080/10572414.2023.2223062.
- Svend Erik Larsen, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, Denmark, DK in Orbis Litterarum, 2022.
"Combining a capacious vision of the long history of oceanic narratives in Western culture with incisive analysis of recent scholarship in the “blue humanities,” A Poetic History of the Oceans provides an excellent overview of oceanic literature and culture. At this book’s core lies a brilliant reading of Moby-Dick as model for four distinct historical iterations of Western imaginations of the sea. In reading Melville’s novel as simultaneously theocentric, anthropocentric, technocentric, and geocentric, Frank shows how this American classic opens onto global vistas. Beyond an innovative analysis of the English-language canon, however, this book also brings Scandinavian writers and texts forward into their rightful places as oceanic pioneers. The introduction of figures such as Jens Munk, Jonas Lie, Martin Andersen Nexø, and Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen suggests how much scholars and readers can learn from this book."
- Steve Mentz, Professor of English, St. John's University, New York, USA.
“A Poetic History of the Oceans has compelling qualities: a fascinating topic, incredible erudition, an innovative, wide-ranging approach, and a seductive, reader-friendly style. The quality of the scholarship is remarkable, both concerning the works examined and the thinkers and literary critics that are consulted and cited. Given the superb treatment of the topic, the wealth of information, and the theoretical insights, Frank’s book could very well become a classic in its field.”
- Thomas Pavel, Professor of Romance Languages, Comparative Literature, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, USA.
"A Poetic History of the Oceans is intended primarily for literary historians and literary scholars, but it is also essential reading for anyone interested in notions of the sea and the oceanic imagination. Søren Frank's main ambition is to write a history of Western maritime literature and culture, what he calls an oceanic literature, and at the same time to contribute to research on this literature. He succeeds in this with clarity and erudition."
- Sylvain Briens in Norsk litteraturvitenskapelig tidsskrift, vol. 26, no. 2, 2023, pp. 147–149. Review translated from Swedish.
“Ultimately, the primary advantage for archaeologists wading through Frank’s highly ambitious volume is exposure to numerous theoretical positions, each of which offers relevant perspectives for thinking with maritime material culture, and maritime worlds more broadly. Each theme’s theoretical set is written in an accessible manner, citing and summarizing key sources, before running that set parallel to the literary works in question.”
- Sara A. Rich, “International Journal of Nautical Archaeology”, 52:2, 469, 2023. DOI: 10.1080/10572414.2023.2223062.
Søren Frank is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. His publications include Migration and Literature (2008), Salman Rushdie: A Deleuzian Reading (2011), and Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Cultural Analysis of Manchester United (2013).