The Lure of the Sea: Discovery of the Seaside 1750-1840 - Softcover

Corbin, Alain; Phelps, Jocelyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140247998 ISBN 13: 9780140247992

Publisher: Penguin, 1995

Synopsis

This is an account of how the pleasures of the seaside were discovered in the Western World. Based on the premiss that how we see the landscape over time is shaped not just by nature but also by the cultural baggage we bring to it, this book argues that with few exceptions, people living before the 18th century knew nothing of the attractions of the coast. The sea was perceived as sinister and unchanging, an unfathomable force inspiring horror, associated with floods, sea monsters and the like. With the Enlightenment, a change occurred. The book follows a course from a theocentric interpretation of the shore as the line drawn by God's finger after the Flood, through the sea as experienced by Neoclassical travellers on the Grand Tour, to the beloved sea of the Romantic poets and the growth of the popular seaside resort that came in their wake.

About this title

Review:

"Broad–ranging, scholarly, always suggestive." The Observer

"Alain Corbin′s The Lure of the Sea is a compact and brilliant taxonomy of the shifting meanings of the sea and shore." New York Review of Books

"Stimulating and valuable for students of the history of resorts, the arts and the economic value of the sea as a source of fish and routeway." The Mariner′s Mirror

From the Back Cover:

Alain Corbin's wonderful book explores the dramatic change in Western attitude towards the sea and seaside pleasures that occurred between 1750 and 1840. Interest in travel; the arrival of landscape painting, geology and natural theology; fashions in medicine and the advent of the bathing-machine; the emergence of Romanticism and the Sublime - these are only some of the elements that helped transform perceptions. By the time Jane Austen wrote Sanditon - perhaps the first 'seaside' novel - in 1817, the sea and shore had come to be viewed as something intensely and sensuously pleasurable, with beach holidays all the rage in new resorts from Brighton and Scarborough to Dieppe.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140247998
• ISBN 13: 9780140247992
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416