Skrivena stranica’s Reviews > The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750-1840 > Status Update

The Romantic generation was obsessed by shipwrecks. (242)

It spread the more effectively in France and England because it accorded with political symbolism and found its place in the protocol of the classical storm. In the 1740s, however, its grip became stronger, and the emotional strategy which it made possible became more complex. It also gained the rhetoric of pity (234)

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the shipwreck
became the second most evocative figure of catastrophe after the
earthquake, and sensitive souls were moved by any mention of it.
Of course the theme had already been worked over during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spanish and Portuguese
literature. (234)

Between 1810 and 1 840, as this literature fascinated with
beaches, grottoes, and wet sand was developing, sea-shore painting
went through its brief golden age. (231)

prevladava obala i špilje na obali

The Romantic literary figures of the corsair and the pirate also play a role in their own way in this extolling of shoreline humanity. In paintings that include them, there is a juxtaposition of group ferocity with the seductive mystery of sublime individuality that stands out from it. (228)

The fragile life of the imperiled sailor, anonymous and pious,
aroused compassion. The wave of Romanticism and, in France,
the atmosphere of the Restoration, combined to reactivate the
Christian symbolism of the sea at the same time as the animal
or barbarous face of the seaside communities. (227)

In this way their pleasure mounted before
evocations that emphasized the extent of time and peopled the
so1itary shores with a succession of dreamy characters who gave
an intermittent meaning to the ruins, the mossy rocks, or the
sea-gull's cry. (220)

Romantic travellers delighted in imagining all the intermediate
scenes that stood like a series of screens between present times
and long ago. Their dreams centred on the ages revived by
historical anecdotes. (220)

The way that the Romantics interpreted the populations of
the shores was based on nostalgia. More strongly than ever
before', this interpretation was stimulated and guided by an
awareness of how fragile speech, rituals, customs, fairy-tales, and
legends were. This discovery of their precariousness and of the
meaning that was being lost engendered the suffering necessary
to enjoy the place. (219)