| Author keywords |
religion, faith, allegory, music, art, poetry, literature, shipwreck |
| Abstract |
The failed endeavors of humans on the waters, relayed through tales of shipwrecks, have inspired cultural responses for millennia. Some of our oldest and long-standing stories are those of shipwrecks. The power of the sea to destroy the best that humans can build and to defeat the most skilled sailor is a well-known and often-told tale. That basic tale has been passed down to modern times through scripture, music, poetry, art, personal narratives, and more recently, through photography and film. Whether it is the book of Genesis, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Moby Dick, modern movies about Titanic, or Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the sublime nature of shipwrecks—and indeed, disaster—is a recurrent theme in culture, and while in more modern times global cataclysms, comet strikes, pandemics, and zombie apocalypses reign in print and at the box office, for much of human history, shipwreck—singular and plural—was the muse. |
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