Maritime Relations
Detailing the lives of ordinary sailors, their families and the role of the sea in Britain’s long nineteenth century, Maritime Relations presents a powerful literary history from below. It draws on archival memoirs and logbooks, children’s fiction, and social surveys, as well as the work of canonical writers such as Gaskell, Dickens, Conrad, and Joyce. Maritime Relations highlights the workings of gender, the family, and emotions, with particular attention to the lives of women and girls. The result is an innovative reading of neglected kinship relations that spanned cities and oceans in the Victorian period and beyond. Working at the intersection of literary criticism, the blue humanities and life writing studies, Emily Cuming creatively redefines the relations between life, labour, and literature at the watery edge of the nineteenth century.
Emily Cuming is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. She is the author of Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880–2012 (2016), editor of Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, and editorial board member of the Journal of Victorian Culture.
