Nautical fiction, frequently also naval fiction, sea fiction, naval adventure fiction or maritime fiction, is a genre of literature with a setting on or near the sea, that focuses on the human relationship to the sea and sea voyages and highlights nautical culture in these environments. The settings of nautical fiction vary greatly, including merchant ships, liners, naval ships, fishing vessels, life boats, etc., along with sea ports and fishing villages. When describing nautical fiction, scholars most frequently refer to novels, novellas, and short stories, sometimes under the name of sea novels or sea stories. These works are sometimes adapted for the theatre, film and television.
The development of nautical fiction follows with the development of the English language novel and while the tradition is mainly British and North American, there are also significant works from literatures in Japan, France, Scandinavia,Ray Taras, "A Conversation with Carsten Jensen", World Literature Today, May 2011: and other Western traditions. Though the treatment of themes and settings related to the sea and maritime culture is common throughout the history of western literature, nautical fiction, as a distinct genre, was first pioneered by James Fenimore Cooper (The Pilot, 1824) and Frederick Marryat (Frank Mildmay, 1829 and Mr Midshipman Easy 1836) in the early 19th century. There were 18th century and earlier precursors that have nautical settings, but few are as richly developed as subsequent works in this genre. The genre has evolved to include notable literary works like Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1899–1900), popular fiction like C.S. Forester's Hornblower series (1937–67), and works by authors that straddle the divide between popular and literary fiction, like Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series (1970–2004).
Because of the historical dominance of nautical culture by men, they are usually the central characters, except for works that feature ships carrying women passengers. For this reason, nautical fiction is often marketed for men. Nautical fiction usually includes distinctive themes, such as a focus on masculinity and heroism, investigations of social hierarchies, and the psychological struggles of the individual in the hostile environment of the sea. Stylistically, readers of the genre expect an emphasis on adventure, accurate representation of maritime culture, and use of nautical language. Works of nautical fiction may be romances, such as historical romance, fantasy, and adventure fiction, and also may overlap with the genres of war fiction, children's literature, travel narratives (such as the Robinsonade), the social problem novel and psychological fiction.
Definition
What constitutes nautical fiction or sea fiction, and their constituent naval, nautical or sea novels, depends largely on the focus of the commentator. Conventionally sea fiction encompasses novels in the vein of Marryat, Conrad, Melville, Forester and O'Brian: novels which are principally set on the sea, and immerse the characters in nautical culture. Typical sea stories follow the narrative format of "a sailor embarks upon a voyage; during the course of the voyage he is tested – by the sea, by his colleagues or by those that he encounters upon another shore; the experience either makes him or breaks him".Peck, pp. 165-185.
Some scholars chose to expand the definition of what constitutes nautical fiction. However, these are inconsistent definitions: some like Bernhard Klein, choose to expand that definition into a thematic perspective, he defines his collection "Fictions of the Sea" around a broader question of the "Britain and the Sea" in literature, which comes to include 16th and 17th maritime instructional literature, and fictional depictions of the nautical which offer lasting cultural resonance, for example Milton's Paradise Lost and Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Choosing not to fall into this wide of a definition, but also opting to include more fiction than just that which is explicitly about the sea, John Peck opts for a broader maritime fiction, which includes works like Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), that depict cultural situations dependent on the maritime economy and culture, without explicitly exploring the naval experience.Peck, "Introduction", pp. 1-9. However, as critic Luis Iglasius notes, when defending the genesis of the sea novel genre by James Fenimore Cooper, expanding this definition includes work "tend[ing] to view the sea from the perspective of the shore" focusing on the effect of a nautical culture on the larger culture or society ashore or focusing on individuals not familiar with nautical life.
This article focuses on the sea/nautical novel and avoids broader thematic discussions of nautical topics in culture. In so doing, this article highlights what critics describe as the more conventional definition for the genre, even when they attempt to expand its scope.
History
Sea narratives have a long history of development, arising from cultures with genres of adventure and travel narratives that profiled the sea and its cultural importance, for example Homer's epic poem the Odyssey, the Old English poem The Seafarer, the Icelandic Saga of Eric the Red (c.1220–1280), or early European travel narratives like Richard Hakluyt's (c. 1552–1616) Voyages (1589).Robert Foulke, The Sea Voyage Narrative. (New York: Routledge, 2002). Then during the 18th century, as Bernhard Klein notes in defining "sea fiction" for his scholarly collection on sea fiction, European cultures began to gain an appreciation of the "sea" through varying thematic lenses. First because of the economic opportunities brought by the sea and then through the influence of the Romantic movement. As early as 1712 Joseph Addison identified "the sea as an archetype of the Sublime in nature: 'of all the objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my imagination as much as the sea or ocean' ".Essay on the sea in the Spectator 1712, quoted by Jonathan Raban, "Introduction" to The Oxford Book of the Sea. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 8. Later in this century Samuel Taylor Coleridge's narrative poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), developed the idea of the ocean as "realm of unspoiled nature and a refuge from the perceived threats of civilization".Klein, Bernhard, "Introduction:Britain in the Sea" in Klein, Fictions of the Sea, pp. 1-10. However, it is Byron "who has taken most of the credit for inventing the nineteenth-century sea, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–16):
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea and music in its roar.Jonathan Raban, "Introduction" to The Oxford Book of the Sea, p. 14.
Early sea novels A distinct sea novel genre, which focuses on representing nautical culture exclusively, did not gain traction until the early part of the 19th century. However, works dealing with life at sea had been written in the 18th century. These include works dealing with piracy, such as Daniel Defoe's Captain Singleton (1720), and A General History of the Pyrates (1724), which contains biographies of several notorious pirates such as Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts.A general history of the robberies & murders of the most notorious pirates. By Charles Johnson Introduction and commentary by David Cordingly. Conway Maritime Press (2002).
Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Roderick Random, published in 1748, is a picaresque novel partially based on Smollett's experience as a naval-surgeon's mate in the British Navy.
19th century Jonathan Raban suggests that it was the Romantic movement, and especially Byron, which made "the sea the proper habit for aspiring authors", including the two most prominent early sea fiction writers James Fenimore Cooper and Captain Frederick Marryat,The Oxford Book of the Sea.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 16. both of whose maritime adventure novels began to define generic expectations about such fiction. Critic Margaret Cohen describes Cooper's The Pilot as the first sea novel and Marryat's adaptation of that style, as continuing to "pioneer" the genre. Critic Luis Iglesias says that novels and fiction that involved the sea before these two authors "tend to view the sea from the perspective of the shore," focusing on the effect of nautical culture on the larger culture or society ashore and individuals not familiar with nautical life; by example Iglesias points to how Jane Austen's novels don't represent the genre, because, though the sea plays a prominent part in their plots, they keeps actual sea-culture as a "peripheral presence." Similarly, Iglesias describes earlier English novels like Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), and Roderick Random (1748) as populating the naval world with characters unfamiliar with the sea to better understand land-bound society, not fulfilling the immersive generic expectations of nautical fiction. Following the development of the genre's motifs and characteristics in works like those of Cooper and Marryat, a number of notable European novelists explored the genre, such as Eugène Sue, Edouard Corbière, Frederick Chamier and William Glasgock.
James Fenimore Cooper wrote what is often described as the first sea novel,This is a debatable claim, dependent on the limitations placed on the genre, per the discussion in the definition section. Margaret Cohen, for example, states that "[a]fter a seventy-five year hiatus, the maritime novel was reinvented by James Fenimore Cooper, with the Pilot". The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, p. 133. The Pilot (1824), in response to Walter Scott's The Pirate (1821).Peck, "American Sea Fiction", in Maritime Fiction, 98-106. Cooper was frustrated with the inaccuracy of the depiction of nautical culture in that book. Though critical of The Pirate, Cooper borrowed many of the stylistic and thematic elements of the historical fiction genre developed by Walter Scott, such as a desire "to map the boundaries and identity of the nation." In both The Pilot and the subsequent The Red Rover (1827) Cooper explores the development of an American national identity. In the later work Afloat and Ashore (1844) he examines this subject again, as well as offering a critique of American politics. Cooper's novels created an interest in sea novels in the United States, and led both Edgar Allan Poe (with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) and mass-market novelists like Lieutenant Murray Ballou to write novels in the genre. The prominence of the genre also influenced non-fiction. Critic John Peck describes Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840) as utilizing a similar style and addressing the same thematic issues of national and masculine identity as nautical fiction developing after Cooper's pioneering works.
Fenimore Cooper greatly influenced the French novelist Eugène Sue (1804 –1857), his naval experiences supplying much of the material for Sue's first novels, Kernock le pirate (1830), Atar-Gull (1831), the "widely admired" La Salamandre (1832), La Coucaratcha (1832–1834), and others, which were composed at the height of the Romantic movement.Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 170. The more famous French novelist Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) "made no secret of his admiration for Cooper" and wrote Le Capitaine Paul (1838) as a sequel to Cooper's Pilot.Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea, p. 177. Another French novelist who had a seafarer background was Edouard Corbière (1793–1875), the author of numerous maritime novels, including Les Pilotes de l'Iroise (1832), and Le Négrier, aventures de mer, (1834).