| সংক্ষিপ্ত: | <p>This thesis explores the metaphoric role that the maritime world plays in modernist literature.
Specifically, I make the case for a historically grounded modernist maritime metaphorics, by
which authors draw on the material history of a pervasive maritime world in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries in their engagements with signature topics such as the city (Joseph
Conrad), perception (Virginia Woolf and H.D.), expatriation (T.S. Eliot), and right-wing
politics (Ezra Pound). Combining perspectives from the New Modernist Studies and Oceanic
Studies, my thesis focuses on a historicist turn in the critique of modernist literature's use of
marine metaphors, tracing the ways in which naval competition, a global maritime economy,
scientific innovation in marine biology, and maritime imperialism are reflected and
interrogated in figurative language in the period. Reading the work of canonical authors such
as Conrad, Woolf, H.D., Eliot, and Pound, I catalogue the ways in which differing and
conflicting deployments of the sea, of the submarine, and of drowning are used, in their work,
to reflect, interrogate, or advocate for a specifically maritime world order. This maritime
world, I argue, constitutes an important and neglected context for the emergence and the
development of Anglo-American modernism. This thesis thus offers a corrective to the
occlusion of the maritime as a context for modernism, and provides an example of a
historicist reading of maritime metaphors that have largely been dismissed as clichés or
ahistorical flights of fancy.</p>
<p>In Chapter 1, I trace the maritime underpinnings of the modern imperial metropolis of
London. Reading Joseph Conrad's city texts like The Return and The Secret Agent, I argue
that metaphors describing the city as watery or oceanic register the maritime economy and
colonial hinterland that shape an urban modernity.</p>
<p>Chapter 2 argues that the submarine metaphorics of Woolf and H.D. draws on the
nexus of marine biology, visual culture, and optical science to interrogate the subjectivity and
gendering of vision.</p>
<p>Chapter 3 contrasts the submarine metaphorics of the previous chapter with that of
T.S. Eliot, tracing the horror and allure that he reads in images of drowning and watery
ego-death.</p>
<p>Finally, in Chapter 5, I study the occluded world of maritime trade, focusing on the
poetry and prose of Ezra Pound. I argue that the sea is a crucial economic exemplar in The
Cantos and in Pound’s prose, ranging throughout his work in the ancient maritime economies
of Venice, Rome, and Athens, in the maritime contestations of the American Revolution by
US president John Adams with the British and the French, and finally in the imperialist
ideology of Italian Fascism.</p>
<p>Taken together, these chapters constitute evidence that the modernist sea, in its
historically grounded metaphorics, provides authors with a powerful lens through which to
interrogate conceptions of the urban, of perception, of the transatlantic, and of empire.</p>
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