Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture

Sea travel has been pivotal in globalisation, as well as in the development of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery. Maritime mobilitiesthe ways in which the sea facilitates the movement of goods and peopleand immobilitiesthe ways in which the sea entraps, blocks and slows movementhave long been represented in literary and cultural forms. Today, maritime mobilities are again importantwith thousands of oceanic migrants, for instance in the Mediterranean and China Seas, dying during attempts to reach safer shores in the developed world, and with oceanic pollution by industrial maritime endeavours, from overfishing and devastating oil spills to mass tourist cruise ships. Ships make for temporary, mobile homes for maritime laborers, but also are sometimes prisons from which ship workers cannot escape. As human smugglers, environmental activists, pirates, and maritime laborers cross paths with tourists, industrial fishermen, climate scientists and deepsea miners, maritime mobilit ies produce physically, legally, politically, and culturally fluid oceanic spaces. Understanding movement by sea is newly critical for developing viable social, economic, environmental, and political futures. This essay collection sets out to shed light on maritime mobilities, from the eighteenth century to the present, as they are constructed and negotiated in Anglophone literature and culture. In order to do so, it brings mobility studies into conversation with literary and cultural studies of the sea. The contributions in this essay collection cover a variety of topics, ranging from early American theatre, images of albatrosses and rubber ducks as ecocritical mobilizations, the precarious migrant crossings on steamships around 1900 to contemporary North American refugee narratives. Maritime literary and cultural studiespart of the wider field of the oceanic humanitiesexamines the ways in which oceans are represented in language, art, literature and other forms of expression. Mobility studies, a fledgling interdisciplinary field, addresses mobility as a physical, geographical, material, socio-economic, as well as cultural practice. Bringing these approaches together in a study of maritime mobility, this book sets out to critically explore the multi-faceted world of oceanic mobilities and the work of their cultural representations.