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Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day

Thompson’s contribution to Shipwreck in Art and Literature consists of a substantial 12,000 word introduction and a 9,000 word research chapter entitled ‘Shipwreck and the Forging of the Commercial Nation: the 1786 Wreck of the Halsewell’. Both pieces, and the volume as a whole, are contributions to the emerging field of maritime literary studies which aims to engage questions of cultural exchange, hybridity, globalization and empire under the umbrella of what is broadly speaking a postcolonial and new historicist approach. The chapter also contributes more specifically to 18th-century/Romantic-era literary and cultural studies. In this way, the chapter extends Thompson’s earlier explorations (in The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination and Romantic-Era Shipwreck Narratives [both 2007]) of the cultural resonance and historical importance of shipwreck and other forms of traumatic travel in the Romantic period, while both pieces may also be considered as developing Thompson’s ongoing concern (in such work as the 2011 New Critical Idiom Travel Writing volume) with the role of travel and travel writing in British culture. In addition to writing these pieces, Thompson also curated the volume, commissioning the essays initially for a two-day workshop at the National Maritime Museum in 2010.