all covered in one monograph is ambitious. To have chem covered well is a treat. Seated by the Sea is a valuable addition co both labor studies and maritime history. By linking events chat dominated che local scene co larger issues seen industry-wide, Connolly is able co make connections between che particular and the general in a meaningful way. le is hoped chat chis work will encourage subsequent studies char more robuscly flesh out the story chat chis volume begins co cell in so engaging and entertaining a fashion. By derailing che history oflrish dockworkers in Porcland, Maine, Michael Connolly has opened new avenues of investigation while adding substantially co our understanding of the complex interplay between maritime laborers and che worlds they inhabited. TIMOTHY
G.
LYNCH , PHD
Vallejo, California
1he Novel and the Sea by Margaret Cohen (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2010, 328pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 978-0-69114-065-0, $39 .50hc) Here's a tidbit for your next cocktail parry: the term "technological" was first coined, in verse, co compliment rhe maritime language in John Smith's A Sea
Grammar (1627). In lhe Novel and the Sea, Margaret Cohen, professor of comparative literature ar Stanford Universiry, writes: ''Among rhe prefatory endorsements, A Sea Grammar includes a sonnet by Wye Salconscall emphasizing the importance of language as a cool ofwork on rhe ship: "Each Science rermes of Arr ha ch wherewithal I To expresse themselves, called technological!." In che margins, Salconsrall has included a gloss, explaining: " Technologicall, a Greeke word compounded of two Greeke words, n:xvtj-1..~-yo~ signifies words ofArc." Okay, sure, it's in the Oxford English Dictionary. Bue who would've thought co look for it? Cohen's breadth and depth of research is immense, even awe-inspiring. Though fiction is the keel of lhe Novel and the Sea, she frames chis work of literary scholarship with voyage narratives, seamanship manuals, poetry, and fine arc. Cohen finds small treasures like the above while also delivering a small-scale chart-co exercise proper maritime usage-of rhe entire evolution of writing about the sea in Western lireracure, specifically English and French, bur also in ocher European languages. Although occasionally reaching back co our earliest writings (The Odyssey),
Captain Paul Cuffe Exhibit Opening September 22, 2011 Captain Paul Cuffe Park Dedication September 24, 2011 Funded in part by
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Cohen begins chronologically with maritime manuals, like Smith's, and the Early Modern sea voyage narratives. She shows how these books of technical writing and "plain scyle," these explorations of seamanship or craft (a term from Conrad she explores ar length) , were then transformed and converted into the first novels by che likes of Defoe. While from 1748 co 1824 the painters and poets were fixating on the voyage narratives of Cook and Bligh and removing labor from che ocean, drooling over how an ocean storm had the effect of "agreeable horror" on che shorebound viewer, the maritime adventure novel lay dormant. Thar is until James Fenimore Cooper sparked things up again, followed on the ocher side of rhe Adanric by Frederick Marryar in England and Eugene Sue in France. The characters and plots created by these writers reBecced their pose-revolutionary nationalise and political concerns. Cohen then travels "across rhe middle decades of the nineteenth century, when rhe nautical novel was at the apogee ofirs prestige,'' our of which Melville, Hugo, and Conrad "invented rhe modernise novel from sea fiction, responding co rhe decline of craft." Previous critical endeavors have surveyed similar waters, such as Philbrick's James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (1961); Edwards's lhe Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (1994); Foulke's lhe Sea Voyage Narrative (1997); and the superb introduction by Jonathan Raban co lhe Oxford Book of the Sea (1992). Cohen seems co have read chem all and incorporates chem inro lhe Novel and the Sea, while at once engaging with previous analyses of rhe fiction from lubberly philosophers, Marxist literary theorises, and critics of rhe novel. Cohen's significant contributions here, among ochers, are her true focus on rhe novel and a fascinating close reading of Cook's journals co narracologically, lexicographically define rhe elements of seamanship as wrircen and valued by the early mariners, which were then converted co serve rhe novel-a framework she carries throughout. Among critics who explore che literature of the sea in broad terms, Cohen's comparative literature perspective is unique as far as I am aware. Subsequendy, her criticism has a multi-faceted handle on derivations, nuanced meaning, and rransAdantic historical and social <context.
SEA HISTORY 136, AUTUMN 2011