Bernhard Klein, University of Dortmund, Germany Bernhard Klein, James Muldoon, Ulrich Kinzel, Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Sarah Moss, Arnold Schmidt, Ina Habermann, Tobias Doring, Valerie Burton, Jurgen Kramer, Susan Bassnett, Carl Pedersen, Patrizia A. Muscogiuri.

• Contents: Introduction: Britain and the sea, Bernhard Klein; Who owns the sea?, James Muldoon; Orientation as a paradigm of maritime modernity, Ulrich Kinzel; Satan's ocean voyage and 18th-century seafaring trade, Anne-Julia Zwierlein; Class war and the albatross: the politics of ships as social space and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Sarah Moss; Walter Scott's The Pirate: Imperialism, nationalism and bourgeois values, Arnold Schmidt; Death by water: the theory and practice of shipwrecking, Ina Habermann; The sea is history: historicizing the Homeric sea in Victorian passages, Tobias Döring; 'As I wuz a-rolling down the highway one morn': fictions of the 19th-century English sailortown, Valerie Burton; Conrad's crews revisited, Jürgen Kramer; Cabin'd yet unconfined: heroic masculinity in English seafaring novels, Susan Bassnett; 'The sea is slavery': middle passage narratives, Carl Pedersen; Cinematographic seas: metaphors of crossing and shipwreck on the big screen (1990-2001), Patrizia A. Muscogiuri; Bibliography; Index.

"exceptionally well conceived ... the particular interdisciplinary range here - sea fiction, maritime history, cultural studies - is both genuinely original and exciting and yet at the same time recognisably associated with a recent tide of interest in the oceanic dimensions of cultural studies." Peter Hulme, Professor in Literature at the University of Essex