Reading underwater wreckage : an encrusting ocean /
Presenting a novel and needed theoretical model for interpreting shipwrecks and other drowned fragments, the histories they tell, and the futures they presage, as junctures of artefact and ecofact, human remains and emergent ecologies, this book puts the environmental humanities, and particularly mu...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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London ; New York :
Bloomsbury Academic,
[2023].
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| Series: | Environmental cultures series.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | Presenting a novel and needed theoretical model for interpreting shipwrecks and other drowned fragments, the histories they tell, and the futures they presage, as junctures of artefact and ecofact, human remains and emergent ecologies, this book puts the environmental humanities, and particularly multispecies studies, in close conversation with literary studies, history and aesthetic theory. Earth's oceans hold the remains of as many as three million shipwrecks, some thousands of years old. Instead of approaching shipwrecks as either artefacts or "ecofacts," this book presents a third frame for understanding, one inspired by the material dynamism of sea-floor stuff. As they become encrusted by oceanic matter-some of it living, some inanimate-anthropic fragments participate in a distinctively submarine form of material relation. That relation comprises a wide, and sometimes incalculable, array of things, lives, times and stories. Drawing from several centuries of literary, philosophical and scientific encounters with encrustations, as well as from some of the innumerable encrusted "art-forms" that inhabit the sea floor, this book serves anyone in search of better ways to perceive, describe and imagine submarine matters. |
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| Physical Description: | xxxi, 178 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [155]-174) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781350290044 1350290041 9781350290006 1350290009 |