Abstract
In his 1975 Lecture ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, the historian J. G. A. Pocock coined the term ‘Atlantic Archipelago’ in the hopes of engaging with the ‘plural history of a group of cultures situated along an Anglo-Celtic frontier’ in a way that avoided the Anglocentric biases of terms such as ‘British Isles’ or ‘United Kingdom’ (p. 606). His usage of the term aimed to ‘construct a new ordering of historical consciousness’ that was equally attentive to the national narratives of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (p. 612). Since the delivery of his initial lecture, Pocock’s plea has been answered most fully by the scholar John Kerrigan, whose seminal text Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (2008) similarly adopts the term ‘Atlantic Archipelago’ in the hope of stripping ‘away modern Anglocentric and Victorian imperial paradigms [in order] to recover the long, braided histories played out across the British-Irish archipelago between three kingdoms, four countries, divided regions, variable ethnicities, and religiously determined allegiances’ (p. 2). Writing in a post-devolution landscape, Kerrigan’s study works to present an alternative history of this large island group, one that is able to consider narratives of national identity, cultural connection and belonging through more neutral, plural and relational terms than have previously been available. Concerned with ‘fugitive alliances’, mobility and being ‘between and among islands’, Coastal Works continues this vein of archipelagic scholarship across 14 chapters which highlight the plural, dynamic and interrelated histories and cultures of what they call the ‘Atlantic edge’ (pp. 13; 3). For the editors Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom and Jos Smith, the powerful imaginary of the coast serves as a connective thread between the twelve case studies which take us on an intimate and critical journey across the length of the Atlantic edge. Tracing an itinerant path from the Hebrides to the Devon coast and out across the Irish Sea to the Aran Islands, we encounter a range of poets, naturalists and travel writers who position the coast at the centre of their writings and in doing so establish the coast as a crucial location for the imaginative histories of Ireland, Britain and the wider North Atlantic landscape.
The collection is in part influenced by the recent work of John Brannigan whose examination of the cultures of the Irish Sea and recent text Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890–1970 (2014) serves as an important precursor to the ideological underpinnings of Coastal Works. His exploration of the various ‘crises in the political identities of the states, nations, and peoples settled in these islands’ (Brannigan, p. 17) shapes the sustained engagement of Coastal Works with the ‘alternative, devolved literary geographies of the archipelago’ and aids the collection’s critical examination of national borders, boundaries and modes of belonging (Allen, Groom and Smith, p. 9). Spanning the early-modern to the modern day, this collection deftly weaves together a range of histories, places and cultures in a way that ‘encourages us to think of these nations, regions, localities, and people as less firmly determined by the ground beneath their feet than by the challenge that connecting with one another has represented’ (p. 18).
As the editors suggest, literary interactions with the coast consistently reveal it to be a place that allows authors to open ‘the intensely local up to the trans-local, to the archipelagic, to the transatlantic, and the more broadly global, amplifying, at one and the same time, both a sense of place and a sense of planet’ (p. 7; emphasis in original). For many of the case studies included here, the coast becomes a space of transition and transgression that defies isolationist narratives of containment and control. As Brannigan suggests in his contribution to the collection, ‘“Felt Routes”: Louis MacNeice and the North-East Atlantic Archipelago’, the physical and cultural ‘ambivalence’ of the coast allows writers to forge ‘new vocabularies of habitation, new geographies of connection and living between the islands’ that are simultaneously global and local in their outlook (p. 94). Brannigan’s exploration of the shifting spatial dimensions of the Atlantic edge chimes with other chapters in the collection that seek to ‘explore an increasingly place-based literary geography of the archipelago that has begun to coalesce with a renewed interest in the local’ while still remaining distinctly porous and open (Allen, Groom and Smith, p. 13; emphasis in original). Chapters such as Nicola Stafford’s ‘The Roar of the Solway’ reveal the ability of the coast to complicate notions of border and boundary as the shifting sands of the Solway Firth prompt her to ask ‘where does Scotland stop or England begin, and where do their waters become Irish?’ (p. 44). Similarly, Daniel Brayton’s examination of Erskine Childer’s The Riddle of the Sands presents the ‘notion of coastal indeterminacy’ as a means of transgressing ‘the conventional boundaries of national identity’ (p. 119).
The collection’s focus on the indeterminacy of the coast is mediated by a sustained examination of the very concept of ‘place’, revealing a sense of place that is both ‘locally grounded but at the same time involved in a network of cultural exchange’ (Allen, Groom and Smith, p. 12). The collection’s inclusion of cartographic frontispieces emphasises the ‘fluid but grounded nature of place’ (Allen, Groom and Smith, p. 13) where Eliot Kendal’s detailed yet strikingly sparse maps situate the reader within the shifting topographies of the collection. What is important about these included artworks, and the collection as a whole, is their focus not just on the terrestrial dimensions of the archipelago, but on the connective sea between. Coastal Works thus not only stands as a significant contribution to the rise of archipelagic studies, but situates itself within the growing discipline of oceanic scholarship that has emerged in recent years in line with the rise of the ‘Blue Humanities’ which emphasises ‘an historical understanding of water and its effects on human society’ (Allen, Groom and Smith, p. 4). For example, Nick Groom’s chapter ‘Draining the Irish Sea’ considers the colonial histories and politics of water through his examination of early-modern narratives of the Irish Sea in which the sea between is presented not as a political border, but as an active trade route and communicative medium. Margaret Cohen’s chapter ‘Seeing Through Water’ similarly asserts that the ocean is a distinctly international space and thus ‘a realm of our planet that exceeds the control of the nation-state’ (p. 211). While these chapters present the ocean and seas as important connective spaces that defy the limits of national boundaries, they do so at the expense of considering the more troubling dimensions of oceanic interconnection, militarisation and the destructive realities of ocean privatisation.1 Despite these slightly idealising tendencies, Coastal Works stands as a vital text in advancing new forms of scholarship that are attentive to the ecological, cultural and historical importance of those spaces and voices that have so often been relegated to the margins of academic study.
Note
1. See for example Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s works regarding ocean militarisation and pollution: ‘Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity’, PMLA, 125.3 (May, 2010), 703–712; ‘Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene’, Comparative Literature, 69.1 (2017), 32–44; and Patricia Yaeger’s examination of the ‘techno-ocean’ in ‘Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons’, PMLA, 125.3 (2010), 523–545 and ‘The Ocean as Quasi-Object, or Ecocriticism and the Doll from the Deep’, The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture, ed. Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas (London, 2017), 166–185.