Maritime Space as Law and Light
Retrieving William Clark Russell's An Ocean Free-Lance (1882)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4549167 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephanie Jones (0000-0002-3917-3721), Stephanie J Jones (0000-0001-5279-1260, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2014-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1532-5768 • E-ISSN: 1532-5768 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/cch.2014.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W2068904605 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
William Clark Russell's An Ocean Free-Lance (1882) most obviously reads as a brittle homage to the nobility of a certain mode of imperial activity: it is, most apparently, a memorialisation of the privateer. But this is not the novel's only register. It also involves a broody engagement with oceanic space that is harder to interpret. This might simply be read within a belated-Romantic genre of novelistic yearning within the age of steam for the age of sail: in such terms, the novel easily reads as a critique of industrialisation. But the clear legal tones of the narrative and the novel's particular maritime aesthetics indicate that the nostalgia is more fully felt for the loss of a righteous order, a universal lex naturalis that is embodied in-that inhabits-the privateer. But even this is brought into question by the obscure poetics of light and water that slow down the plot and over-determine the atmosphere of the narrative. Via an engagement with recent historiographies of empire and of British privateering, against the background of work on the significance of law within nineteenth-century literature, and with the help of W.C.R.'s contemporary Robert Louis Stevenson, this paper reads An Ocean Free-Lance towards some larger speculations on the anxious meanings of the ocean as both an inhabited and abstracted space of empire
Ancient history · Art · Art history · Empire · Literature · Narrative · Poetics · Poetry · Romance · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Philosophy · Travel Writing and Literature
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |