Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present

Tricia Cusack’s publications include Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge (ed.) (Ashgate 2012); Riverscapes and National Identities (Syracuse University Press 2010); Art, Nation and Gender: Ethnic Landscapes, Myths and Mother-Figures (co-edited, Ashgate 2003), and numerous articles.

• Introduction: Framing the ocean, 1700 to the present: envisaging the sea as social space, Tricia Cusack. Part I Exploring the Ocean: Colonial Crossings: From mare tenebrorum to Atlantic Ocean: a cartographical biography (1470-1900), Carla Lois; The Old World anew: the Atlantic as the liminal site of expectations, Emily Burns; Second encounters in the South Seas: revisiting the shores of Cook and Bougainville in the art of Gauguin, La Farge and Barnfield, Elizabeth C. Childs. Part II Ships as Microcosms of Society: The artist travels: Augustus Earle at sea, Sarah Thomas; Sailors on horseback: the representation of seamen and social space in eighteenth-century British visual culture, Geoff Quilley; The 'other' ships: dhows and the colonial imagination in the Indian Ocean, Erik Gilbert; Representation, commerce, and consumption: the cruise industry and the ocean, Adam Weaver. Part III Narratives of Shipwrecks, Rafts, and Jetsam: Shipwrecks, mutineers and cannibals: maritime mythology and the political unconscious in eighteenth-century Britain, Carl Thompson; The sea as repository: Tacita Dean's Teignmouth Electron, 1999 and Sean Lynch's DeLorean Progress Report, 2010, Kirstie North; Reconstructing the raft: semiotics and memory in the art of the shipwreck and the raft, Yvonne Scott; Plastic as shadow: the toxicity of objects in the anthropocene, Pam Longobardi. Part IV Natural and Unnatural Histories: Oceanic Imaginings: A 'dreadful apparatus': John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark and the cultures of natural history, Emily Ballew Neff; Mermaids and metaphors: Dorothea Tanning's surrealist ocean, Victoria Carruthers and Catriona McAra; 'Something rich and strange': coral in contemporary art, Marion Endt-Jones; 'No fancy so wild': slippery gender models in the coral gallery, Pandora Syperek. Index.

'Tricia Cusack’s edited volume, Framing the Ocean is a thoughtful, richly detailed, and engagingly organized series of essays on the unique confluences between oceanic studies and the history of the visual arts. The range of subjects is exemplary: Romantic oceanscapes, shipwrecks, and travel narratives, yes, but also Indian Ocean dhows and mutineer typologies. Literature, painting, and sculpture link together iconographic studies of ocean liners and plastic pollution, natural histories, and coral collections, all rendered with ingenious scholarly imagination.' Matt K. Matsuda, Rutgers University, author of Pacific Worlds 'This is an important collection of essays, from an impressive international array of scholars and artists. It embodies the latest thinking on the recent cultural history of the ocean, a subject of growing academic and general interest. The essays are lucid, accessible and imaginative, and the volume as a whole is well-balanced and clearly organized.' Christiana Payne, Professor of History of Art, Oxford Brookes University '... a stellar contribution from a galaxy of well-placed international scholars to a developing literature about the oceans as an historical, cultural and social phenomenon.' John Mack, Chairman, The Sainsbury Institute for Art; Professor, School of Art History and World Art Studies, University of East Anglia 'This engaging and erudite volume will interest a range of scholars in humanities and social sciences, including art and cultural historians, cultural geographers, and historians of empire, travel, and tourism.' Irish Arts Review 'The essays in Cusack's collection Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present are commendable for advancing the reclamation of social history and human culture from the narrower dominions of both marine biologists and antiquarian pirate enthusiasts. Ocean culture is at once varied and pervasive, and we have been shaped by, and now shape, the ocean realm.' Bulletin of the Pacific Circle