Product Description: Book by C. F. Burgess

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A literary tribute to the last earthly frontier - the ocean.

Once seen as a dark and sinister force, the domain of monsters, the sea was associated with catastrophe and fear by many Europeans prior to the eighteenth century. Alain Corbin's engaging book reveals how attitudes toward the ocean gradually began to shift from the negative to the positive, so that by the mid-1800s our present-day salubrious notion of the seashore had come into being.Going back to ancient times, Corbin describes conceptions of the sea in relationship to how people thought and felt about their place in the world. He then shows how the Enlightenment and changing attitudes in science, literature, and art affected notions of the sea. Ocean bathing came to be seen as therapeutic, the sea was linked with the creation of life, and the shore became a locale for self-exploration and reverie. Discovery of the seaside had political, economic, and social effects, too. The shore as a place of pleasure led to the rapid growth of British coastal towns such as Brighton, followed by other resorts in Europe. All of this Corbin lays out in wonderful detail, blending history, theory, and anecdote into an absorbing whole.The Lure of the Sea suggests the fashioning of a modern sensibility in the West's discovery of the shore—one that is health-conscious and intent on regeneration through vigorous contact with nature. Written by one of today's most literate and imaginative historians, it offers an inviting cultural excursion for scholars and general readers alike.

Product Description: Abstract space becomes concrete place by being bound to individual and historical experience. Sea and coast - in texts from antiquity to the present mostly seen as mere spaces of transit and division between geographical places - are hotly contested topographical phenomena, which instigate the designation of highly semanticized cultural spaces in imagination and everyday practice...read more

A collection of maritime literature from ancient times to the present gives an engrossing account of humankind's relations with the sea, incorporating accounts of shipwrecks, exploration, and war by figures from St. Paul to Tom Clancy

A collection of fictional writings about the sea features selections from well-known authors including William Shakespeare, William Golding, Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, James Fenimore Cooper, and others.

Product Description: In this wonderfully wide-ranging volume, Vartan Messier and Nandita Batra have given us a fine collection of maritime riches. From reflections on the ocean as metaphor to shark documentaries and 'Jaws', from Hemingway's organic ecology to Melville's tropic-birds and the establishment of a Puerto Rican maritime preserve, 'This Watery World' reminds us that - onshore and inland - we are all in the grip of our images and interactions with the sea...read more