Book Description

"This book is about how the sea and seafaring shaped literary creativity in early modern Portugal during the most active, consequential decades of European overseas expansion. Josiah Blackmore understands "literary" in a broad sense, including a diverse archive spanning genres and disciplines: epic and lyric poetry, historical chronicles, nautical documents, ship logs and diaries, shipwreck narratives, geographic descriptions, and reference to texts of other seafaring powers and literatures of the period (including works from Spain, Italy, Galician-Portugal, and Catalan). The centerpiece of the book, the great Luís de Camões, is arguably the sea poet par excellence of early modernity, not only of Portugal and Iberia, but of Europe more generally. Blackmore shows that the sea and nautical travel for Camões and his contemporaries were not merely historical realities in early modern Iberia during the age of discovery; they were also principles of cultural creativity that connect to larger critical debates in the widening field of the maritime humanities. For Blackmore, the sea, ships, and nautical travel unfold into a variety of empirical, metaphoric, and symbolic dimensions, and the oceans across the globe that were traversed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries correspond to oceans within the literary self, vast reaches and depths of emotion, consciousness, memory, and identity. Thus the sea and seafaring were not merely themes in textual culture but were also principles that created individual and collective subjects according to oceanic modes of perception, nautical modes of thought: a "maritime subject" that was one of the consequences of the sustained practice of navigation and imaginative engagements with the sea throughout the period. Blackmore concludes with a discussion of depth and sinking in shipwreck narratives as metaphoric and discursive dimensions of the maritime subject, foreshadowing empire's decline. The book will be welcomed by students of Iberian literature and culture, the maritime humanities, and those interested in maritime poetics beyond early modernity"--