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'All ocean is her own': the image of the sea and the identity of the maritime nation in eighteenth-century British art

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posted on 2023-06-08, 06:08 authored by Geoffrey Quilley
Benedict Anderson's proposed definition of the nation as 'an imagined political community' admits a potential for the functioning of non-verbal and non-literary signs and discourses in the construction of the idea of 'nation'. The conclusion that the nation must be at some level imagined begs the question of what media and cultural channels provide the means for such an imagining to take hold. Bernard Smith's book "Imagining the Pacific" plays on the linguistic proximity of the words 'imagine' and 'image' to suggest the eighteenth-century western imagery of geographical discovery in the Pacific operated at the centre of an hermeneutic circle in which the imagery was informed by pre-existing values of western cultural imagination about the Pacific, but served to provide a detached 'scientific' appraisal, an apparently objective image, of the newly discovered regions, upon which the imagination could feed. It is the premise of this essay that the pictorial image of navigation and the sea functioned similarly in imagining the nation in eighteenth-century Britain, giving visual form to a growing sense of political, economic and cultural community, but simultnaeously stimulating its growth.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Page range

132-152

Pages

260.0

Book title

Imagining Nations

Place of publication

Manchester

ISBN

9780719054600

Series

York Studies in Cultural History

Department affiliated with

  • Art History Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

Geoffrey Cubbitt

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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