Maritime Modernism : Seas, Coasts and Islands in British and Irish Literatures

A comparative study of seas, coasts and islands as sites of post-imperial consciousness in the modernist fiction and poetry of the British Isles.

By tracing maritime settings and contexts across modernist literature in Britain and Ireland, Maritime Modernism: Seas, Coasts and Islands in British and Irish Literature reveals new connections between the period’s key texts as well as evidence of how cultural and political relationships to water can differ significantly depending upon one’s vantage point. While writers across the archipelago employed coastal, nautical and oceanic imagery to challenge the narratives and cartographies of maritime-imperial Britain, authors in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales also differ in the ways they imagine the sea/land relationship, and its histories, against the backdrop of a devolving United Kingdom. Major authors such as Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and W.B. Yeats are studied alongside less well-known writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Lynette Roberts, David Jones, Neil Gunn and Claire Spencer.