Shipwreck Modernity

Steve Mentz is professor of English at St John’s University in New York City. He is author of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean and Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction.

• ContentsTwo PrefacesTheoretical Preface: Epochal Claims and the Age of ShipwreckNarrative Preface: Ulysses and the Global Ecology1. The Wet and the Dry: Shipwreck Hermeneutics2. Angry Gods: Theologies of the Ocean3. Isle of Tempests: Bermuda in the Early Modern ImaginationInterchapter: Pearls That Were His Eyes4. Metis: Jeremy Roch5. Metis: Edward BarlowInterchapter: Philosopher at the Mast-Head6. “We Split”: Sea Poetry and Maritime Crisis7. Castaways: Surviving DisasterThree Short EpiloguesThe Bright Light of ShipwreckThe BookfishSeven Shipwrecked Ecological TruthsAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

"A compelling, provocative, even lyrical piece of scholarship that will undoubtedly inaugurate new critical discussions in the fields of maritime humanities, eco-criticism, early modern English literature, and shipwreck studies."-Josiah Blackmore, Harvard University"Mentz has shaped an account that looks poised to become a key ecocritical text in the years to come."-Glasgow Review of Books"Steve Mentz offers close and careful readings of early modern texts that are contextualized and scholarly, but also politically engaged."-The Sixteenth Century Journal"This is a remarkable and valuable scholarly work that offers much beyond its analysis of early modern texts and histories."-Renaissance Quarterly"A thoughtful exploration of the modalities of how and why culinary practices and tastes changed over time."-Comitatus 48"Shipwreck Modernity offers useful challenges to early modernists to re- think our periodization schemes, to environmental historians to more fully consider the ocean, and to all readers to ponder how to stay afloat amidst our ecological crises."-Journal of Early Modern History