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- Title
Phantom Bark: The Chronotope of the Ghost Ship in the Atlantic World.
- Authors
Barrington, Julia Mix
- Abstract
Ghost ships haunt Atlantic literature, but surprisingly few scholars have focused on these striking Gothic figures with any depth. Responding to this oversight, this essay introduces the chronotope of the ghost ship to the literary conversation, tracing it through four key transatlantic texts: Richard Henry Dana, Jr's Two Years Before the Mast (1840), a tale of the Flying Dutchman found in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1821), 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798), and Melville's novella 'Benito Cereno' (1855). Wherever they appear in literature, ghost ships voice Gothic horror on the Atlantic; the strange temporality of the frozen yet eternally journeying ghost ship engenders in these texts a compulsion for communication with the living world. These Gothic missives bring uncomfortable and unspeakable subjects - particularly the moral terror of slavery - into the consciousness of more mainstream readers. To understand the ghost ship is to understand the Gothic double of Gilroy's Atlantic world.
- Subjects
GHOSTS in literature; SHIPS in literature; GOTHIC language literature; CHRONOTOPE; TWO Years Before the Mast (Book : Dana); BENITO Cereno (Book : Melville); 19TH century (Literary period)
- Publication
Gothic Studies, 2017, Vol 19, Issue 2, p58
- ISSN
1362-7937
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.7227/GS.0029