Waterscapes: representing the sea in the American imagination, 1750-1800
Date
2017
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation critically examines representations of oceanic space in American art to bring fresh insight into how colonial and early national identity was constructed on and through the environment, specifically the sea. In the late-eighteenth century period of empire, revolution, nation-formation, and economic and territorial expansion, the world’s oceans were at once a ubiquitous fact of life and an illusory space to comprehend. For people in British America, whether they had been to sea or not, paintings, prints, and trade objects conveyed the texture of a maritime world that connected colonies, nations, and empires. Americans registered environmental, political, cultural, and economic associations with the sea through these forms of representation. However, such objects and images also had the power to manifest the physical and intellectual distance between Americans’ position in the world and their ambition to master it. Examining depictions that range from the open oceans of the Atlantic and Pacific to the protected harbors of the American coast, this dissertation examines how the traversals and imaginings of oceanic space were made visible and meaningful through material representation. By examining representations of the sea in art and material culture, it brings new forms of evidence to bear on assessing the early United States in its global and oceanic context.
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Keywords
Language, literature and linguistics, Communication and the arts, Social sciences, Atlantic world, Black atlantic, British empire, Material culture