The Novel and the Sea by Margaret Cohen (review)

In The Novel and the Sea Margaret Cohen makes a compelling case for the sea novel that celebrates the thrill of adventure neglected by the "land" novel. Maritime fiction specialists will be drawn to the book's detail, but the assessment of "the novel" from the stimulating new perspective of the sea also appeals to a more general readership. Cohen focuses on the concept of craft, which she defines as the diverse skills of seamanship and leadership displayed by the ideal sailor and explains through detailed examination of the grounding of Captain Cook's ship on the Great Barrier Reef in 1770. She identifies fourteen characteristic elements of craft from Cook's actions such as prudence and protocol (Cook's careful and systematic attempts to float the ship), providence (the mariner's belief in God and/or fortune), and practical reason. Establishing craft as a framework in the first chapter is effective because it ensures continuity as disparate maritime texts, including nonfiction, novels, visual art, and poetry, are analyzed in turn. This is an invigorating assessment of representations of sailing and the sea, which occupies a carefully plotted position within this increasingly popular area of research. Being a study of American, British, and French texts from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, Cohen's book has a wider scope than some other books in the subject area, such as Cesare Casarino's Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (2002). The Novel and the Sea is distinguished from other survey-style texts, such as John Peck's Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719-1917 (2001), which covers similar material but in the context of the British Empire, by Cohen's unique emphasis on the sailor's craft.

One of the fourteen elements of craft, labeled "remarkable occurrences," comes from Cook's ship's log, in which events worthy of remark were recorded, and Cohen uses it to explore the "plain-speaking" style found in nonfiction maritime texts in the second chapter. Cohen demonstrates how sea fiction developed from this plain-speaking style, ultimately attracting a wider readership in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). She departs from the convention of reading Crusoe in socioeconomic terms as an early capitalist and gives a new perspective on the novel by revealing the tension between prudence and adventure by reconsidering Crusoe as sailor and explorer. Defoe's mariner is then compared to similar adventuring protagonists in the novels of Abbé Prévost, Alain René Le Sage, and Tobias Smollett. These adventurous characters encapsulated the dynamic era of global trade in the early eighteenth century, and by defining them as "maritime picaresque," Cohen locates them within the grand narrative of the sea novel.

The third chapter is unusual, not least because it consists of just seven pages, and this brevity is a unique way of emphasizing the lack of sea fiction in the period between 1748 and 1824. Cohen suggests possible causes for this, such as the increasing number of women reading novels or even the difficulty of following Smollett's success, but she also notes that the sea continued to play a small role in novels of this period by Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. Following chapter 3 is a section entitled "Interlude"; here, the main argument about the sailor's craft is suspended and focus shifts to a consideration of the sea as sublime form. Cohen analyses John Milton's Paradise Lost, Samuel Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere and William Falconer's "The Shipwreck" in conjunction with visual art ranging from paintings by seventeenth-century Dutch painter William van de Velde the Younger to those by J. M. W. Turner. This is followed by an intriguing reconsideration of piracy; Cohen interprets the most notorious pirates, the ones depicted by John Exquemelin and Charles Johnson/Daniel Defoe, as expressions of low sublime. Due regard is paid to the other side of the debate, as Cohen presents...