The Naval Novel: A Literary Genre in Historical Perspective

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Stories of sailors and life at sea date to before the era of the classical world, but it is the world of naval life at sea and naval warfare during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries that has captured the imagination of many contemporary readers. Naval and maritime historian John B. Hattendorf presents a history and overview of the naval novel as a literary genre as it arose in English literature. Since the mid-1700s and continuing to the present, authors such as Tobias Smollett, Frederick Marryat, C. S. Forester, Alexander Kent, Patrick O'Brian, and a host of others have written of naval life and naval warfare of the last three centuries. Beyond placing the naval novel in historical perspective, this volume gives readers greater insight and appreciation of the boredom and battles of life at sea. In so doing, The Naval Novel shows the importance the naval novel for the general reader as well as the historian in better understanding naval life at sea.