CRITICISM

Blish, M. “Melville and the Sea Drifters of Japan.” Melville Society Extracts 76 (February 1989): 14-16.

Traces the many mentions in Moby-Dick of Japanese Sea Drifters—sailors whose boats had been disabled and, as a result, drifted with the Pacific currents.

Candido, Anne Marie. “A New Sea in a New Frontier: American Leadership in The Pathfinder.” Etudes Anglaises 44, No. 3 (July-September 1991): 285-95.

Focuses on the Lake Ontario setting of Cooper's novel The Pathfinder.

Cramer, Timothy R. “Testing the Waters: Contemplating the Sea in E[mily] D[ickinson]'s Poem 520 and Kate Chopin's The Awakening.” Dickinson Studies 83 (1992): 51-56.

Compares Emily Dickinson's and Kate Chopin's use of the sea as a setting for soul-searching and individual freedom.

Cuddy, Lois A. “Eliot and Huck Finn: River and Sea in ‘The Dry Salvages.’” T. S. Eliot Review 3, Nos. 1-2 (1976): 3-12.

Discusses how T. S. Eliot's prose introduction to Mark Twain's Huck Finn explicates a portion of Eliot's “The Dry Salvages,” illuminating the poet's own ideas on the metaphoric and literal symbol of the sea.

Dennett, J. J. “Mighty Waters in the Work of Dickens and Turner.” Dickensian 90, No. 3 (Winter 1994): 179-88.

Reflects on the use of sea and water images in the works of novelist Charles Dickens and painter J. M. W. Turner.

Egan, Hugh. “Whitman's Song of Myself.” Explicator 57, No. 2 (Winter 1999): 80-83.

Brief discussion of the violent and brutal images in Section 36 of Whitman's Song of Myself, in which the poet depicts the bloody sea battle that pitted the British ship Serapis against John Paul Jones' Bonhomme Richard.

Emmitt, Helen V. “‘Drowned in a Willing Sea’: Freedom and Drowning in Eliot, Chopin, and Drabble.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 12, No. 2 (Fall 1993): 315-32.

Considers the theme of drowning in novels by three female writers—Kate Chopin, George Eliot, and Margaret Drabble.

Franklin, Rosemary F. “The Seashore Sketches in Twice-Told Tales and Melville.” English Language Notes 21, No. 4 (June 1984): 57-63.

Argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales influenced the writing of Moby-Dick.

French, R. W. “Whitman's Dark Sea: A Note on ‘Patroling Barnegat.’” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1, No. 3 (December 1983): 50-52.

Brief discussion of Whitman's poem “Patroling Barnegat,” a work about a violent storm off the coast of New Jersey.

Fukuchi, Curtis. “‘The Only Firmament’: ‘Sea-Room’ in Emerson's English Traits.” American Transcendental Quarterly 1, No. 3 (September 1987): 197-209.

Discusses sea imagery in Ralph Waldo Emerson's English Traits.

Kalita, Dwight. “Walt Whitman: Ecstatic Sea-Voyager.” Walt Whitman Review 21 (1975): 14-22.

Examines how Whitman used the symbols of the ocean and the circling globe in Leaves of Grass to develop the idea of the spiritual union of the body and soul.

Kier, K. E. “‘At Sea’ in Port: Melville's Geophobia.” Melville Society Extracts 60 (November 1984): 10-12.

Contends that Melville was a “geophobe” who despised nationality and whose protagonists invariably prefer life on the endless sea to life on land.

Nelson, Andrew. “Bligh, Albatrosses, and The Ancient Mariner.” English Language Notes 33, No. 4 (June 1996): 59-62.

Maintains that Coleridge looked to Lieutenant William Bligh's Voyage to the South Sea (1792) when writing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Saunders, Brian. “Melville's Sea Change: From Irving to Emerson.” Studies in the Novel 20, No. 4 (Winter 1988): 374-88.

Argues that in Moby-Dick, Melville was answering to certain seafaring images in the works of Washington Irving and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Schenck, Celeste M. “‘Every Poem an Epitaph’: Sea-Changes in Whitman's ‘Out of the Cradle …’ and Crane's ‘Voyages.’” Ariel 16, No. 1 (January 1985): 3-25.

Contends that Whitman's “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and Crane's “Voyages” have their roots in Milton, Wordsworth, and the pastoral elegiac tradition in general.

Taylor, Alan. “James Fenimore Cooper Goes to Sea: Two Unpublished Letters by a Family Friend.” In Studies in the American Renaissance, edited by Joel Myerson, 43-54. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

Reprints two letters recently found among the papers of James's father, Judge Cooper, which indicate that the younger Cooper ran away from home in order to go to sea. This contradicts earlier assumptions that the Judge was responsible for forcing his son to endure the hardships of working as a common sailor.

Zacharias, Greg W. “The Marine Metaphor, Henry James, and the Moral Center of The Awkward Age.” Philological Quarterly 69, No. 1 (Winter 1990): 91-105.

Examines James's use of the metaphorical “language of the sea” in his fiction—particularly in his 1899 novel The Awkward Age.