The inner sea : maritime literary culture in early modern Portugal / Josiah Blackmore.

Author/creator Blackmore, Josiah, 1959- author.
Format Electronic
PublicationChicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Copyright Date©2022
Description1 online resource (225 pages) : illustrations
Supplemental ContentEBSCOhost
Subjects

Contents Introduction: Immense and Possible Oceans -- Saltwater Poetics -- Epic Seas -- Lyric Seas -- The Sunken Voice.
Abstract "This book is about how the sea and seafaring shaped literary creativity in early modern Portugal during the most active, consequential decades of European overseas expansion. Josiah Blackmore understands "literary" in a broad sense, including a diverse archive spanning genres and disciplines: epic and lyric poetry, historical chronicles, nautical documents, ship logs and diaries, shipwreck narratives, geographic descriptions, and reference to texts of other seafaring powers and literatures of the period (including works from Spain, Italy, Galician-Portugal, and Catalan). The centerpiece of the book, the great Luís de Camões, is arguably the sea poet par excellence of early modernity, not only of Portugal and Iberia, but of Europe more generally. Blackmore shows that the sea and nautical travel for Camões and his contemporaries were not merely historical realities in early modern Iberia during the age of discovery; they were also principles of cultural creativity that connect to larger critical debates in the widening field of the maritime humanities. For Blackmore, the sea, ships, and nautical travel unfold into a variety of empirical, metaphoric, and symbolic dimensions, and the oceans across the globe that were traversed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries correspond to oceans within the literary self, vast reaches and depths of emotion, consciousness, memory, and identity. Thus the sea and seafaring were not merely themes in textual culture but were also principles that created individual and collective subjects according to oceanic modes of perception, nautical modes of thought: a "maritime subject" that was one of the consequences of the sustained practice of navigation and imaginative engagements with the sea throughout the period. Blackmore concludes with a discussion of depth and sinking in shipwreck narratives as metaphoric and discursive dimensions of the maritime subject, foreshadowing empire's decline. The book will be welcomed by students of Iberian literature and culture, the maritime humanities, and those interested in maritime poetics beyond early modernity"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references and index.
Source of descriptionDescription based on print version record.
Issued in other formPrint version: Blackmore, Josiah, 1959- Inner sea. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022 9780226820460
Genre/formCriticism, interpretation, etc.
Genre/formLiterary criticism.
Genre/formCritiques littéraires.
ISBN9780226820477 (electronic bk.)
ISBN0226820475 (electronic bk.)
ISBN(cloth)
ISBN(cloth)
Stock number9780226820477 BiblioVault

Availability

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Electronic Resources Access Content Online ✔ Available