Shakespeare's Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration

Dan Brayton

University of Virginia Press, Apr 12, 2012 - Literary Criticism - 280 pages

Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In Shakespeare’s Ocean, Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship.

Shakespeare lived during a time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging from The Comedy of Errors to the valedictory The Tempest, Brayton demonstrates Shakespeare’s remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work.

About the author

Dan Brayton is Associate Professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College and the coeditor of Ecocritical Shakespeare.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Shakespeare's Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration; Under the Sign of Nature
• Author: Dan Brayton
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 2012
• ISBN: 0813932270, 9780813932279
• Length: 280 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Nature / General