The Novel and the Sea

Winner of the 2012 Barbara and George Perkins Prize, The International Society for the Study of Narrative Winner of the 2010-2011 Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Second Runner-Up for the 2011 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association In her bracing, often scintillating book about the associations of prose fiction and the ocean since the early eighteenth century, Margaret Cohen laments that critics have themselves tended not to trouble readers with the details of adventures at sea... [H]er revisionist account is much needed. --Matthew Beaumont, Times Literary Supplement Cohen's ambitious and refreshing analysis productively connects oceanic studies, studies of the novel, and comparative literature of the long nineteenth century, brings an old archive into a new critical frame, and offers new possibilities for theorizing the novel-as-form. --Gretchen J. Woertendyke, Novel [M]any ... texts touched on or explored at length in The Novel and the Sea receive equal, illuminating, and masterful treatment as individual representatives of the many genres of the maritime book. Further, that treatment is less interpretation than searching description. Bringing to bear a historically specific and technical lexicon, Cohen restores these texts' legibility. Practicing a form of so-called surface reading more interested in what the texts forthrightly say than in what they conceal, she renews their pertinence. No critic could hope to do more. --Cannon Schmitt, Victorian Studies Cohen's eminently readable, learned, and well-illustrated book deserves a wide readership. --Studies in English Literature Lucid, original, and steeped in references both scholarly and popular, this book will particularly delight those who love the sea. --Choice Cohen's breadth and depth of research is immense, even awe-inspiring... The Novel and the Sea is a brilliant work of literary scholarship and an important book to the studies of literature of the sea. --Richard J. King, Sea History Maritime historians often find entertainment by reading maritime novels... Margaret Cohen's book promises to add welcome background and perhaps new direction to a pleasurable pursuit. --Louis Arthur Norton, Northern Mariner