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Narration in the Key of We: The Voyage and the Grammar of Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2025

Samuel Diener
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Abstract

This article asks what might be learned about early modern and modern cultural practices of imagining the self by examining accounts of maritime travel and exploration that (in contrast to the lyric poems, novels, and paintings so often examined by histories of modern selfhood) are narrated in the first-person plural. I use a series of best-selling eighteenth-century British narratives, focusing on the 1748 account of George Anson's voyage, to consider this kind of collective narration. I then turn to William Cowper's 1799 poem “The Castaway” as an example of a text in a genre often imagined as paradigmatically focused on the individual—the lyric—that engages with the maritime narrative tradition and uses it to explore the possibilities of a more fluid and contingent sense of the self.

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Essay
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PMLA , Volume 140 , Issue 1 , January 2025 , pp. 71 - 87
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Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Modern Language Association of America

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