The View from the Masthead

“A rich meditation on the literary culture of early national and antebellum sailors and the cultural work their narratives performed.” — New England Quarterly

“A much-needed literary and cultural critic’s perspective.” — American Historical Review

“Thanks to this fascinating and informative study, it is as difficult to conceive of maritime literature without sailor narratives as it is to remember that the contributions of sailors to literary culture have until this moment gone unrecognized in literary history.” — Common-Place

“Essential reading for those interested in the sea and in narrative theory.” — The Journal of American History

“[An] intelligently argued book.” — International Journal of Maritime History

“A dense, highly intellectual study of American sea writing in the first half of the nineteenth century. . . . Provocative and thoughtful.” — Maryland Historical Magazine

“Blum the rise of the sea narrative as a popular and nationalist literary form but also investigates the reading and writing practices of sailors themselves. Her attention to sailors’ ‘cultures of letters,’ especially to issues of literacy, reading practices, and book making, is particularly valuable. This is an impressive, substantial, well-written book that engages a wide range of criticism and makes an important contribution to traces many fields in American studies.” — Shelley S. Streeby, University of California, San Diego

“Blum argues persuasively for seamen as both producers and consumers of literature, and she makes vivid the self-conscious ways in which they participated in a tradition of writing about shipboard life and about the nature of experience itself. She renews interest in the narratives of Nathaniel Ames, William Leggett, David Porter, and John Sherburne Sleeper and transforms our understanding of the maritime writings of Cooper, Poe, and Melville.” — Samuel Otter, University of California, Berkeley