San Antonio College Library

Allusions to the sea permeate Thoreau's writings, enriching many of his basic ideas. Harp on the Shore examines Thoreau's use of maritime metaphor. It shows how he, a writer ordinarily perceived as quintessentially landlocked, came to view the terrestrial world in terms of the oceanic. The book explores both the poetic and the philosophical implications of Thoreau's passion for the sea. Beginning with Thoreau's deep attachment to the sea and maritime...

"Hoare brings readers on a journey in pursuit of human and animal stories of the sea. Along the way, he encounters drowned poets and eccentric artists, modernist writers and era-defining performers, wild utopians and national heroes famous or infamous, who are all surprisingly, and sometimes fatally, linked to the sea."--Provided by publisher.

For a century, the history of the novel has been written in terms of nations and territories: the English novel, the French novel, the American novel. But what if novels were viewed in terms of the seas that unite these different lands? Examining works across two centuries, this work recounts the novel's rise, told from the perspective of the ship's deck and the allure of the oceans in the modern cultural imagination. The author moors the novel to...

This is the first literary history of the United States to explore exclusively the presence of the sea in American writing. A multiauthor work, it covers the periods and genres that make up our national literature as it considers the ubiquity of nautical symbols, images, and figurative language in addition to expressions of the sea experience itself. While this book situates the literature within American history, particularly maritime history, a...