1st Edition

The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures Reading Littoral Space

By Ursula Kluwick, Virginia Richter Copyright 2015
214 Pages
by Routledge

214 Pages
by Routledge

214 Pages
by Routledge

From early colonial encounters to the ecological disasters of the twenty-first century, the performativity of contact has been a crucial element in the political significance of the beach. Conceptualising the beach as a creative trope and as a socio-cultural site, as well as an aesthetically productive topography, this collection examines its multiplicity of meanings and functions as a natural... Read more

'Twixt land and sea: approaches to littoral studies'.  Visions of the beach in Victorian Britain.  Dover beach and the politics and poetics of perspective.  'Gripping to a wet rock': coastal erosion and the land-sea divide as existentialist/ecocritical tropes in contemporary British and Irish fiction.  Shorelines: littoral landscapes in the poetry of Michael Longley and Robert Minhinnick.  John Burnside's seascapes.  Caribbean beachcombers.  Literary inscriptions on the South African beach: ambiguous settings, ambivalent textualities.  Food for sharks: abjection on the beach.  'Where things meet in the world between sea and land': human-whale encounters in littoral space.  Slow violence on the beach: documenting disappearance in There Once Was an Island.



 

Biography

Ursula Kluwick is Lecturer in English Literature and Virginia Richter is Professor of English Literature at the University of Berne, Switzerland.