Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America
Jason Berger
Abstract
In the antebellum years, the Western world’s symbolic realities were expanded and challenged as merchant, military, and scientific activity moved into Pacific and Arctic waters. This book explores the roles that early nineteenth-century maritime narratives played in conceptualizing economic and social transitions in the developing global market system and what these chronicles disclose about an era marked by immense change. Focusing on the work of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville, the book enhances our understanding of how the nineteenth century negotiated its own tenuous progress by ... More
In the antebellum years, the Western world’s symbolic realities were expanded and challenged as merchant, military, and scientific activity moved into Pacific and Arctic waters. This book explores the roles that early nineteenth-century maritime narratives played in conceptualizing economic and social transitions in the developing global market system and what these chronicles disclose about an era marked by immense change. Focusing on the work of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville, the book enhances our understanding of how the nineteenth century negotiated its own tenuous progress by portraying how a wide range of maritime stories lays bare disturbing experiences of the new. The book draws on Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian notion of fantasy in order to reconsider the complex way maritime accounts operated in the political landscape of antebellum America, examining topics such as the function of maritime labor know-how within a transformation of scientific knowledge, anxiety produced by conflict between gender-specific and culture-specific forms of enjoyment, and how legal practices illuminate troubling juridical paradoxes at the heart of Polk-era political life.
Keywords:
antebellum years,
maritime narratives,
James Fenimore Cooper,
Herman Melville,
Slavoj Žižek,
fantasy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816677061 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816677061.001.0001 |
