Shipboard Literary Cultures

Susann Liebich is Assistant Professor of Modern History at Heidelberg University, Germany. She is a co-author of The Transported Imagination (Cambria Press, 2018) and has published on the history of reading and on Australian and New Zealand periodicals in the interwar period. Her current research focuses on the sea in personal writing and popular print culture. Laurence Publicover is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Dramatic Geography (Oxford University Press, 2017) and of several articles on early modern literature, maritime culture, and their intersections. His current research focuses on the deep sea and seabed in literary and non-literary contexts.

• Chapter 1: Stephen R. Berry (Associate Professor of History, Simmons College, US), “The Sailing Ship as a School of Virtue”.- Chapter 2: Christian Algar (Curator, Printed Heritage Collections, British Library), “Books with Providence: The Power and Influence of a Puritan Naval Chaplain’s Library at Sea”.- Chapter 3: Tamsin Badcoe (Lecturer in English, University of Bristol, UK), “Writing the Cabin as Cloister in the Diary of Sister Mary Paul Mulquin”.- Chapter 4: Jimmy Packham (Lecturer in North American Literature, University of Birmingham, UK): “The Maritime Self on the American Whaleship”.- Chapter 5: Laurence Publicover (Senior Lecturer in English, University of Bristol, UK) and Eli Cumings (Postgraduate Researcher, University of Cambridge), “Shipboard Diaries as Navigational Instruments”.- Chapter 6: Helen Chambers (Research Associate, The Open University, UK), “The Torrens as a space of writing, reading, and performance”.-  Chapter 7: Mary Isbell(Assistant Professor of English, University of New Haven, US), “Recognition and Anonymity: Shipboard Theatricals and Newspapers aboard USS Macedonian”.- Chapter 8: Susann Liebich (Postdoctoral Fellow in History, Heidelberg University, Germany), “Identity and Community in New Zealand Troopship Magazines of the First World War”.- Chapter 9: Tamson Pietsch (Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia), “The laboratory method made mobile: learning aboard the 1926-27 Floating University”.- Chapter 10: David Punter (Professor of English, University of Bristol, UK), “Down to the Sea in Ships”.- Afterword: Hester Blum (Associate Professor of English, Penn State University, USA).

“I found every one of the ten chapters … absolutely fascinating. A real strength of the collection is its coherence. The extent of cross-referencing across the chapters indicates a particularly careful editing process, and helps the main themes to emerge more strongly from the book as a whole. Shipboard Literary Cultures is a formidable work of collaborative scholarship and will be of great interest to scholars across all areas of maritime studies and book history.” (Faye Hammill, The Mariner's Mirror, April 28, 2023)