10 books match the query 'Maritime'
Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson, editors
Duke University Press, 2019

Edited by Elisabeth Mann Borgese, Aldo Chircop, and Moira L. McConnell
University of Chicago Press, 2002

Edited by Elisabeth Mann Borgese, Aldo Chircop, and Moira L. McConnell
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Melissa Gniadek
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
Hayley Cotter
University of Alabama Press, 2026
A vivid exploration of how early modern literature transformed the law of the sea into a rich imaginative realm of maritime space and poetic possibility
Poetics of the Legal Sea in English Renaissance Literature is a richly layered study that traces how early modern writers imagined the sea as both a legal landscape and a site of narrative possibility. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the book illuminates the ways literary forms conceptualized the maritime laws that governed the early modern world. Its narrative moves fluidly between legal frameworks and poetic language, revealing a dynamic exchange between artistic expression and the systems that regulated life at sea.
Hayley Cotter’s analysis charts a metaphorical voyage, guiding readers from the calm departure of genre and jurisdiction through turbulent encounters with piracy, shipwreck, and salvage. Plays and poems become vessels that carry ideas about authority, justice, and sovereignty, while rhetorical devices such as metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy deepen the imaginative pull of maritime experience. This journey foregrounds the cognitive effects of literary language, showing how early modern authors engaged with legal culture in ways that often moved beneath the surface of conscious thought.
As the chapters progress, literary texts become active participants in shaping understandings of law and maritime space. Shakespearean drama, Elizabethan pirate tales, sonneteering traditions, and anonymous sea poems all contribute to a vibrant conversation about how societies negotiated law and commerce on the open water. Bringing together readers interested in early modern literature, maritime history, and interdisciplinary inquiry, Poetics of the Legal Sea in English Renaissance Literature offers a compelling exploration of how the ocean’s vast, shifting expanse inspired new ways of thinking about power and the stories that give shape to legal life.
L. Stephen Cox
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Stephen Mullen
University of London Press, 2020
Douglas R. Burgess
University Press of New England, 2014
Matthew Taylor Raffety
University of Chicago Press, 2013

Denise Russell
Pluto Press, 2010
With piracy raging in the Indian Ocean, international disputes over undersea oil and gas, and chronic overfishing, the oceans have rarely been subject to such varied and environmentally damaging conflict outside a world war. In Who Rules the Waves? Denise Russell gives us a rare insight into these issues and how they could be resolved.
International law states that a coastal country has territorial rights for 12 miles into the sea beyond its coastline, and economic rights for 200 miles, but in practice many countries have virtually no control over their own waters, and there is no international agency powerful enough to settle disputes. Russell provides a thorough examination of the politics of the sea, showing that without a radical change in ocean governance, accelerating climate change and overuse of the sea's resources is likely to have catastrophic effects.