Pub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0006
Matthew P. M. Kerr
Joseph Conrad promoted precision as a principle of quality in literary writing, and an epitome of sailorly ethics and good practice. But he simultaneously insisted that haziness and indeterminacy were indispensable to his novels. Accommodating this apparent contradiction, this chapter argues that precision does not equate to a denial of vagueness. Instead, reading Conrad shows that precision as an epistemological practice and fictional method must accommodate inaccuracy, mostly in its mediations between particularity and abstraction. The split quality of precision relates to the sea by way of shifts in the practice and regulation of shipping, which accelerated in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The maritime history of Conrad’s precision suggests an underexplored vector for the widely acknowledged modernist aesthetics of exactitude, usually allied to mechanization. Precision, for Conrad, is a way of thinking and writing in intimacy with error.
{"title":"Joseph Conrad’s Departures","authors":"Matthew P. M. Kerr","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Joseph Conrad promoted precision as a principle of quality in literary writing, and an epitome of sailorly ethics and good practice. But he simultaneously insisted that haziness and indeterminacy were indispensable to his novels. Accommodating this apparent contradiction, this chapter argues that precision does not equate to a denial of vagueness. Instead, reading Conrad shows that precision as an epistemological practice and fictional method must accommodate inaccuracy, mostly in its mediations between particularity and abstraction. The split quality of precision relates to the sea by way of shifts in the practice and regulation of shipping, which accelerated in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The maritime history of Conrad’s precision suggests an underexplored vector for the widely acknowledged modernist aesthetics of exactitude, usually allied to mechanization. Precision, for Conrad, is a way of thinking and writing in intimacy with error.","PeriodicalId":259720,"journal":{"name":"The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117122641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0002
Matthew P. M. Kerr
This chapter recovers the nineteenth-century milieu for the more focused author studies that follow. It gives a discursive historical account of two marine locations characterized by their uncertain boundaries in the period: the shore-line and the deep sea. This twinned emphasis allows an exploration of the developing capacity to probe further and deeper, limning some specific contours of the marine welter. The chapter draws on mutually influential genres of sea-writing, with key works including Jane Austen’s unfinished novel about sea-bathing; the scientific treatises of Philip Henry Gosse and Charles Wyville Thomson; the popular journalism of Charles Camden (a pseudonym for Richard Rowe); Charles Kingsley’s fiction and creative non-fiction; Thomas De Quincey’s ruminations on drowning; and Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘“Wireless”’. The discussion introduces a recurring motif: the interrelationship of the sea’s literal and symbolic meanings in the nineteenth-century cultural imaginary.
{"title":"Shallows and Deeps","authors":"Matthew P. M. Kerr","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter recovers the nineteenth-century milieu for the more focused author studies that follow. It gives a discursive historical account of two marine locations characterized by their uncertain boundaries in the period: the shore-line and the deep sea. This twinned emphasis allows an exploration of the developing capacity to probe further and deeper, limning some specific contours of the marine welter. The chapter draws on mutually influential genres of sea-writing, with key works including Jane Austen’s unfinished novel about sea-bathing; the scientific treatises of Philip Henry Gosse and Charles Wyville Thomson; the popular journalism of Charles Camden (a pseudonym for Richard Rowe); Charles Kingsley’s fiction and creative non-fiction; Thomas De Quincey’s ruminations on drowning; and Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘“Wireless”’. The discussion introduces a recurring motif: the interrelationship of the sea’s literal and symbolic meanings in the nineteenth-century cultural imaginary.","PeriodicalId":259720,"journal":{"name":"The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131735389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0004
Matthew P. M. Kerr
For many critics, Charles Dickens’s use of the sea produces problematic effects, as solid features of his nautical scenes continually dissolve into literary cliché. By contrast, this chapter suggests that it is the mobile doubleness of the literary sea—at once unique and commonplace, credible and implausible—that appeals to Dickens. The discussion focuses on Dombey and Son and the Uncommercial Traveller essay ‘The Shipwreck’, tracing clichéd marine associations (including the sea as divine), figures (the midshipman), and set-pieces (the shipwreck). By involving the sea in his prose, Dickens often finds a means by which both his characters and the individuals he encounters as a journalist can be made to coexist in his imagination with their ideal or literary doubles.
{"title":"The Imitable Charles Dickens","authors":"Matthew P. M. Kerr","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"For many critics, Charles Dickens’s use of the sea produces problematic effects, as solid features of his nautical scenes continually dissolve into literary cliché. By contrast, this chapter suggests that it is the mobile doubleness of the literary sea—at once unique and commonplace, credible and implausible—that appeals to Dickens. The discussion focuses on Dombey and Son and the Uncommercial Traveller essay ‘The Shipwreck’, tracing clichéd marine associations (including the sea as divine), figures (the midshipman), and set-pieces (the shipwreck). By involving the sea in his prose, Dickens often finds a means by which both his characters and the individuals he encounters as a journalist can be made to coexist in his imagination with their ideal or literary doubles.","PeriodicalId":259720,"journal":{"name":"The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122649962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0005
Matthew P. M. Kerr
This chapter attends to nineteenth-century texts where the sea lurks in the background—as the context for a sojourn or a crossing or a memory, or as a figurative element. The first part of the discussion shows how the Victorian novel’s sprawl and supposed formlessness were sometimes negotiated through marine objects, experiences, and metaphor. Particular attention is paid to a sea-shell metaphor used by George Eliot. The other sections examine three canonical Victorian novels: William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. These texts reveal a set of authors who were to varying degrees attracted by the sea, unsure about the depth of their commitment to it, and interested in making imaginative use of that same irresolution. The chapter also contains a short discussion of Victorian sea-poetry, in which the more rigorous formal structures of verse discipline marine vagueness.
{"title":"Unsolved Seas and the Victorian Novel","authors":"Matthew P. M. Kerr","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter attends to nineteenth-century texts where the sea lurks in the background—as the context for a sojourn or a crossing or a memory, or as a figurative element. The first part of the discussion shows how the Victorian novel’s sprawl and supposed formlessness were sometimes negotiated through marine objects, experiences, and metaphor. Particular attention is paid to a sea-shell metaphor used by George Eliot. The other sections examine three canonical Victorian novels: William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. These texts reveal a set of authors who were to varying degrees attracted by the sea, unsure about the depth of their commitment to it, and interested in making imaginative use of that same irresolution. The chapter also contains a short discussion of Victorian sea-poetry, in which the more rigorous formal structures of verse discipline marine vagueness.","PeriodicalId":259720,"journal":{"name":"The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125130382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0007
Matthew P. M. Kerr
Virginia Woolf attempted to enact closure through writing about the sea. For Woolf, sea-writing is inexorably associated with nineteenth-century power structures: the sea is a masculinized emblem of military and economic might, and (relatedly) a conduit of empire. However, this concluding chapter measures two forms of debt to the nineteenth century’s seas against each other in two key novels by Woolf. While The Voyage Out shows Woolf discarding sea styles and stories as chauvinist and imperialist, the sea later enables the productive formal instability upon which The Waves launches its critique of imperial patriarchy. A short coda to the chapter summarizes central arguments and ideas in the book, in particular the relevance of its argument to studies not just of sea-writing but also of literary language more broadly.
{"title":"One, Two, One, Two","authors":"Matthew P. M. Kerr","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Virginia Woolf attempted to enact closure through writing about the sea. For Woolf, sea-writing is inexorably associated with nineteenth-century power structures: the sea is a masculinized emblem of military and economic might, and (relatedly) a conduit of empire. However, this concluding chapter measures two forms of debt to the nineteenth century’s seas against each other in two key novels by Woolf. While The Voyage Out shows Woolf discarding sea styles and stories as chauvinist and imperialist, the sea later enables the productive formal instability upon which The Waves launches its critique of imperial patriarchy. A short coda to the chapter summarizes central arguments and ideas in the book, in particular the relevance of its argument to studies not just of sea-writing but also of literary language more broadly.","PeriodicalId":259720,"journal":{"name":"The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130769643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0003
Matthew P. M. Kerr
This chapter explores the under-studied popular marine fiction of Captain Frederick Marryat. Marryat’s sea-novels are shy of the element upon which they are set; he rarely focuses on the craft of sailing and describes the sea itself even less often. If, however, Marryat’s novels are not about the sea, sea-life defines their central characteristic: a multi-faceted repetitiveness. These texts repeat marine tropes that are already themselves repetitious, such as seasickness, heroic resurrection, and the revenant ghost ship. Tightly repetitive adherence to generic formulae is often deemed evidence of contrived or artificial writing. In the context of writing about the sea, though, repetition invites a competing reading: it is perhaps evidence of authenticity, of Marryat’s struggle to find a register appropriate to the ocean.
{"title":"Captain Marryat Repeats Himself","authors":"Matthew P. M. Kerr","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843999.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the under-studied popular marine fiction of Captain Frederick Marryat. Marryat’s sea-novels are shy of the element upon which they are set; he rarely focuses on the craft of sailing and describes the sea itself even less often. If, however, Marryat’s novels are not about the sea, sea-life defines their central characteristic: a multi-faceted repetitiveness. These texts repeat marine tropes that are already themselves repetitious, such as seasickness, heroic resurrection, and the revenant ghost ship. Tightly repetitive adherence to generic formulae is often deemed evidence of contrived or artificial writing. In the context of writing about the sea, though, repetition invites a competing reading: it is perhaps evidence of authenticity, of Marryat’s struggle to find a register appropriate to the ocean.","PeriodicalId":259720,"journal":{"name":"The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language","volume":"101 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124830567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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