Reading Underwater Wreckage

Presenting a novel and needed theoretical model for interpreting shipwrecks and other drowned fragments-the histories they tell and the futures they presage-as junctures of artefact and ecofact human remains and emergent ecologies this book puts the environmental humanities and particularly multispecies studies in close conversation with literary studies history and aesthetic theory.<br/><br/>Earth's oceans hold the remains of as many as three million shipwrecks some thousands of years old. Instead of approaching shipwrecks as either artefacts or ecofacts this book presents a third frame for understanding one inspired by the material dynamism of sea-floor stuff. As they become encrusted by oceanic matter-some of it living some inanimate-anthropic fragments participate in a distinctively submarine form of material relation. That relation comprises a wide and sometimes incalculable array of things lives times and stories. <br/><br/>Drawing from several centuries of literary philosophical and scientific encounters with encrustations-as well as from some of the innumerable encrusted art-forms that inhabit the sea floor- this book serves anyone in search of better ways to perceive describe and imagine submarine matters.