Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century

Book excerpt: This title examines the cultural importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The long nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast, which could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation - a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. This book takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place, and cultural production.