Antebellum at sea : maritime fantasies in nineteenth-century America / Jason Berger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berger, Jason, 1976-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sea stories, American--History and criticism.

Sea stories, American.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Seafaring life in literature.

National characteristics, American, in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 338 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2012]

Summary:

Jason Berger explores the roles that maritime narratives played in conceptualizing economic and social transitions in the developing global market system and what these chronicles disclose about an era marked by immense change. Focusing on the work of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville, Berger enhances our understanding of how the nineteenth century negotiated its own tenuous progress by portraying how a wide range of maritime stories lays bare disturbing experiences of the new. Berger draws on Slavoj ZiZek's Lacanian notion of fantasy in order to reconsider the complex way maritime accounts operated in the political landscape of antebellum America, examining topics such as the function of maritime labor knowledge within a transformation of scientific inquiry, anxiety produced by conflict between gender-specific and culture-specific forms of enjoyment, and how legal practices illuminate troubling juridical paradoxes at the heart of Polk-era political life.

Addressing the ideas of the antebellum age from unexpected and revealing perspectives, Berger calls on the conception of fantasy to consider how maritime literature from that period disputes conventional views of American history, literature, and national identity. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: Bewitching sea

Fantasies of the common sailor; or, enjoying the knowing Jack Tar

Tarrying with the national: fantasizing the subject of state

Tattoos in Typee: rethinking Melville's "cultural grotesque"

Melville's porno-tropics: re-sexuating pacific encounters

The crater and the master's reign: Cooper's "floating imperium"

The sublime abject of democracy: Melville's "floating imperium"

Epilogue: Incomplete sea.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780816677061

0816677069

9780816677078

0816677077

OCLC:

788268261