Matt Salyer United States Military Academy, West Point

Search for other papers by Matt Salyer in
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
‘Let us wash the blood from your mouth’: Revolutionary Horror and Lycanthropy in Frederick Marryat’s The Phantom Ship
Abstract only
Log-in for full text

Marryat’s involvement with the Lower Canada Rebellion situated his encounter with civil war at its ‘most exterminating’ within the production of Phantom, the Cycle’s least conventional historical sea novel; it offered both a point of imaginative recursion and a concentrated image of his broader critique of the Early Republic. Just as the seamen of Midshipman Easy or The Naval Officer operate within multiple hierarchies at once, Marryat’s strangest yarn, replete with ghost ships and werewolves, operates across multiple genres and cultural formations. The common denominator for both the writer and the written in this case is multivalence – the ship that is both ship and ghost, the woman who is both mother and wolf, their writer who is both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, witness and contriver – but in this, Marryat the writer performs the same essential functions as imperial agents and colonial ‘factors’ do within Phantom: adjudication, translation, and open-ended transformation.

  • Collapse
  • Expand

All of MUP's digital content including Open Access books and journals is now available on manchesterhive.

 

All Time Past Year Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 1978 1119 70
Full Text Views 61 4 0
PDF Downloads 35 2 0