'Tempests and Tidal Surges' and 'The Phenomena It Exhibits!'

This panel of papers provides new insights into nineteenth-century literature and environmental humanities, with a focus on: maritime tempests and floods in nineteenth-century scientific, literary and cultural representations; and travel writing by a New Orleans author from the mid-nineteenth century on the Mississippi confluence and the Gulf of Mexico.

How does literary and visual imagery of maritime weather coalesce with scientific writing to establish a newly vibrant maritime imaginary? In a talk entitled “Tempests and Tidal Surges: Maritime Weather in Science, Painting, and Literature in the early 19th century, Professor Susan Oliver will be asking how we might think about these developments now, in a time of climate change and extreme weather conditions.

The talk explores how writing and painting in the early nineteenth centuries responded to excitement about scientific interest in maritime weather. The weather systems that informed James Macpherson’s Hebridean Ossian poems from the 1760s provided a model that was developed by Walter Scott in his historical poem The Lord of the Isles (1815) and Shetland novel The Pirate (1821). Both these works feature action shaped by dramatic sea conditions in the North Atlantic Ocean and North Sea. 

In the art world, Joseph Mallord William Turner’s maritime paintings of the Bell Rock Lighthouse (1819) and Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (1831-32), along with other of his works, drew on Macpherson, Scott, and Beaufort.  

Dr Owen Robinson’s talk is entitled “The Phenomena It Exhibits!”: Benjamin Moore Norman’s Rambles in New Orleans and its American Environs’

This paper comparatively discusses aspects of two 1845 texts by the New Orleans traveller and bookseller Benjamin Moore Norman: a guide book to the city, and a narrative of his voyage to Cuba and Mexico.  Applying elements of place theory, as well as examples from comparable New Orleans writing, and focussing in particular on his fascination in both texts with the confluence of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, Norman’s figuring both of the city itself and of its relation to the wider Americas is seen to be representative both of US expansionist impulses and more nuanced hemispheric thinking.

This seminar is ideal for University of Essex students and researchers as well as members of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Literary Studies. 

The seminar is a hybrid event, to be held on campus and online.  Participants who wish to join remotely can do so via the event Zoom link.