Beschreibung:
Ursula Kluwick is Lecturer in English Literature and Virginia Richter is Professor of English Literature at the University of Berne, Switzerland.
Conceptualising the beach as a creative trope and as a socio-cultural site, this collection examines its multiplicity of meanings and functions as a natural environment engendering both desire and fear in the human imagination from the Victorian period to the present. The contributors examine literature, film, and art, as well as moments of encount
'Twixt land and sea: approaches to littoral studies'. Visions of the beach in Victorian Britain. Dover beach and the politics and poetics of perspective. 'Gripping to a wet rock': coastal erosion and the land-sea divide as existentialist/ecocritical tropes in contemporary British and Irish fiction. Shorelines: littoral landscapes in the poetry of Michael Longley and Robert Minhinnick. John Burnside's seascapes. Caribbean beachcombers. Literary inscriptions on the South African beach: ambiguous settings, ambivalent textualities. Food for sharks: abjection on the beach. 'Where things meet in the world between sea and land': human-whale encounters in littoral space. Slow violence on the beach: documenting disappearance in There Once Was an Island.