230435 Shipwreck, or The Price Britannia Paid for Ruling the Waves (S) (SoSe 2015)

Britannia ruled the waves – but the sea was not easily dominated and often fought back. For a nation that defined itself as a naval, sea-bound one from at least the late Middle Ages onwards, shipwrecks were not just human tragedies; they threatened to undermine Britain’s image of itself, even the very fabric of civilisation. On a ship in trouble, the strict hierarchies that held up the socio-economic and political order might collapse, and civilised human beings might revert to ‘savage’ behaviour. Shipwreck became not only a real danger for a sea-faring nation but also a canvas on which British society projected its worst fears (cannibalism) and its noblest ideals (‘Women and children first!’).
Shipwrecks to be discussed include the Mary Rose (1545), the Spanish Armada (1588), the Sea Venture (1609, a source for Shakespeare’s The Tempest), the myth and reality of ‘wrecking’ off the Cornish coast, the Erebus (1845, part of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the Arctic), the Titanic (1912), and the Endurance (1915, part of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition to Antarctica).
Literary texts and art to be discussed include extracts from Shakespeare’s Tempest, Théodore Géricault’s painting La Méduse (1819), Alexander Selkirk’s account of being castaway on an island (a source for Robinson Crusoe), Wilkie Collins’ and Charles Dickens’ play The Frozen Deep (about the Franklin expedition) and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1878, about the foundering of a ship carrying emigrating Catholic nuns from Salzkotten to New York).