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Jill B. Gidmark, ed. The Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes.(Book Review)-

Article Excerpt
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. xxv + 538 pp.

Jill Gidmark's stated aim with this unusual and often intriguing work of consultation is to "deepen awareness of the value of the sea environment and of the sea experience in American life and letters" (ix). Having grown up on the Atlantic seaboard, summering in Gloucester, I tend to think of the United States of America as sea-bound, sea-related, sea-conditioned. The sea offers metaphors for the longing to return to an imagined Old World, but it also represents a barrier to invasion from Old World powers, as Abraham Lincoln said. The Atlantic Ocean is and has been livelihood for dwellers along the coast and on the islands, but has also been the doom of thousands who have gone down to it in ships. More than 10,000 mariners and fishermen have died at sea in Gloucester since 1623, I am moved to learn from the article on that important town. They were celebrated in a well-known Gloucester statue of a fisherman wearing a nor'wester at the wheel of his vessel--the same wheels, the original ones in wood, that mark memorials in the cemetery in West Gloucester and, I imagine, other cemeteries in Gloucester, where children may still play, as I did (near a grave plot that bears my last name), making believe they are at the helm.

Large numbers of Americans may not think of the country as sea-bound, particularly those who live in what can be called, with approximation, the inland. The approximation is not only due to an evaluation of how far from the seaside one has to live for the sea to cease to be a cultural point of reference; but also to taking into account the mentality of people living on the Great Lakes or the Mississippi or other major waterways, who keep an organic bond with the distant ocean. And then there is that shock that reverberates through generations of westward conquerors, pioneers, and migrants,...

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