This project argues that maritime history and culture shape both the form and the content of the nineteenth century British novel. Each chapter takes up a different historical genre of maritime writing—the shipwreck tale, the steamship story, the logbook, the sea chantey, and the ship surgeon’s manual—as a heuristic for oceanic reading. In recovering these maritime contexts, I track what I call the “oceanic imaginary”: not only how novels literally represent life on and around the ocean, but also how novels draw upon oceanic circulations and exchanges to imagine and craft complex literary systems. Specifically, I chart how novels incorporate historically specific maritime styles, allusions, and structures and how those texts, in so doing, register the flows and frictions of a radically networked world—a world connected and divided, more often than not, by water. As I show, we can read any novel as maritime fiction—regardless of whether the action takes place on land or at sea—if that novel registers the influence of maritime history upon its textual world.

My project merges the historicist concerns of oceanic studies with the renewed critical attention to form. To track the influence of a historical maritime ethos upon literary style, I consider not only large-scale sociopolitical forms (such as the distributed network) but also sentence-level figurations (such as metonymy) that register the text’s engagement with culture and history. Maritime details and figurations provide more than just historical flavor; they serve, rather, as the formal anchors of historicity, the nodes that link the literary text to paraliterary movements across both land and sea. Taken together, my chapters surface how the literary marketplace overlaps with the political, social, economic, and ecological networks of the nineteenth century maritime world.

In tracing the distributed maritime networks of the oceanic imaginary, I also work to remap the literary landscape. In place of the traditional spatiotemporal divisions of Romanticism and Victorianism, I opt for a longer, wider period drawn together by water. As I see it, an oceanic nineteenth century spans multiple bodies of water, from the English Channel to the Caribbean to the Pacific to the South China Sea to the Suez Canal, and stretches from the second voyages of James Cook (1772-75) to the sinking of the Titanic (1912). Framed so expansively, an oceanic nineteenth century affords new literary historical connections—not only between land and sea, but also between certain peoples, places, goods, ideas, events, and technologies previously separated by longstanding trends in academic literary study.