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Shipwreck Modernity: "Ecologies of Globalization, 1550-1719"

Online ISBN:
9781452953571
Print ISBN:
9780816691036
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
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Shipwreck Modernity: "Ecologies of Globalization, 1550-1719"

Steve Mentz
Steve Mentz
St. John's University
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Published online:
22 September 2016
Published in print:
1 December 2015
Online ISBN:
9781452953571
Print ISBN:
9780816691036
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press

Abstract

Shipwreck sinks human ambitions into the global ocean. In the wet chaos of disaster, sailors and writers seek temporary stability amid dynamic change. The vast archive of early modern representations of maritime disaster use this classical topos to model the felt experience of radical cultural change during an era of transoceanic expansion. As English sailors put girdles round about the globe, they encountered and caused ecological disasters. The ancient masterplot of shipwreck provided them with a literary language for their dislocation and uncertainty. The global ecology these representations describe is an oceanic world of disaster, struggle, and--sometimes--survival. Three central paradigms--“wet globalization,” “blue ecology,” and “shipwreck modernity”--describe the cultural meanings of shipwreck stories in historical and imaginative texts from the mid-sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries. The decades during which the English nation and its emerging colonies began to define themselves through oceangoing expansion were also decades in which maritime disaster occupied sailors, poets, playwrights, sermon-makers, and other thinkers. The global ecology of shipwreck transforms catastrophes into partial accommodations with disruptive change. In the end it may not be possible to dry out wet disasters, but efforts to represent them lay open a picture of the human encounter with ecological disaster on a global scale.

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