Tales of shipwreck have always fascinated audiences, and as a result there is a rich literature of suffering at sea, and an equally rich tradition of visual art depicting this theme. Exploring the shifting semiotics and symbolism of shipwreck, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume provide a history of a major literary and artistic motif as they consider how depictions have varied over time, and across genres and cultures. Simultaneously, they explore the imaginative potential of shipwreck as they consider the many meanings that have historically attached to maritime disaster and suffering at sea. Spanning both popular and high culture, and addressing a range of political, spiritual, aesthetic and environmental concerns, this cross-cultural, comparative study sheds new light on changing attitudes to the sea, especially in the West. In particular, it foregrounds the role played by the maritime in the emergence of Western modernity, and so will appeal not only to those interested in literature and art, but also to scholars in history, geography, international relations, and postcolonial studies.

The motifs of island and shipwreck have been present in literature and the arts from ancient times. Whether they occur as plot elements, as part of literary or film imagery, as symbols in paintings, as leitmotifs in songs, or as concepts in philosophical theories, both have always been a source of fascination to authors, artists and scholars. In Shipwreck and Island Motifs in Literature and the Arts, Brigitte Le Juez and Olga Springer have gathered essays that explore shipwreck and island figures in texts as historically, culturally and artistically diverse as Walter Scott’s The Lord of the Isles, Cristina Fernández Cubas’ “The Lighthouse”, reality TV series Treasure Island, pop songs of the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs, or The Otolith Group’s essay-film Hydra Decapita.

This innovative study is the first to analyze systematically an important category of Netherlandish seascape--the storm at sea. It addresses the fundamental issues of meaning and purpose that such pictures pose for students of Dutch landscape and, indeed, of all Dutch realism. Bringing together a vast body of imagery and texts never before assembled, Goedde places this imagery within historical and cultural contexts that permit us to enter into the ideas, values, and metaphorical associations that such pictures held for seventeenth-century viewers. He amplifies this iconographic study with a meticulous and subtle analysis of narrative incident and expressive form that, while respecting the naturalism of the art, reveals its surprisingly conventional and rhetorical character. In particular Goedde links the meaning of Dutch tempest paintings with a rhetorical tradition in Dutch literature. Through his analysis he is able to offer fresh insights not only into these seascapes but into the interpretation of all pre-Romantic landscapes as well. This book is addressed at once to specialists in Dutch art and to a broad group of art historians and scholars concerned with cultural history and the relation of literature to art. It offers a survey of the tempest in art and literature from antiquity to the modern era in order to define the conventional elements of Dutch painting and writing on this theme. An exceptional feature of this study is the author's analysis of the ways conventions encode meaning in both literary and pictorial representations. Explicating these conventional structures and themes in terms of the cosmology of correspondences and of elemental love and strife, Goedde's discussion both encourages and controls metaphorical interpretation of stormscapes. This study also offers an essential historical background to anyone concerned with the picturesque, sublimity, and Romanticism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture because of the importance of the themes of storm and shipwreck in the later period.

A classic tale of seafaring, shipwreck, and survival, reprinted from Wesleyan University Press's 1978 facsimile of the original. When artist, illustrator, writer, and adventurer Rockwell Kent first published N by E in a limited edition in 1930, his account of a voyage on a 33-foot cutter from New York Harbor to the rugged shores of Greenland quickly became a collectors' item. Little wonder, for readers are immediately drawn to Kent's vivid descriptions of the experience; we share "the feeling of wind and wet and cold, of lifting seas and steep descents, of rolling over as the wind gusts hit," and the sound "of wind in the shrouds, of hard spray flung on a drum-tight canvas, of rushing water at the scuppers, of the gale shearing a tormented sea." When the ship sinks in a storm-swept fjord within 50 miles of its destination, the story turns to the stranding and subsequent rescue of the three-man crew, salvage of the vessel, and life among native Greenlanders. Magnificently illustrated by Kent's wood-block prints and narrated in his poetic and highly entertaining style, this tale of the perils of killer nor'easters, treacherous icebergs, and impenetrable fog—and the joys of sperm whales breaching or dawn unmasking a longed-for landfall—is a rare treat for old salts and landlubbers alike.

This impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming modern. At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Colón sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues; really, the first ever database for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed: ballads, erotica, news pamphlets, almanacs, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522, set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection. “Magnificent…a thrill on almost every page” (The New York Times Book Review), The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is a window into sixteenth-century Europe’s information revolution, and a reflection of the passion and intrigues that lie beneath our own insatiable desires to bring order to the world today.

"A thrilling tale of murder and retribution set on the wild seacoast of medieval Japan"--Cover.

Text and illustrations look at the sinking of the Swedish warship Vasa in 1628.