Samuel Baker. Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture‪.‬

Samuel Baker. Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Pp. 344. $49.50. In our contemporary age of jet travel and bullet trains--to say nothing of email and Skype--it is easy to forget that, less than two centuries ago, when Britons wanted to travel beyond their country's borders, voyage by sea was inevitable. Fortunately, we now have Samuel Baker's Written on the Water to remind us. With its strong (but not exclusive) focus on the poetry anal prose of the Lake Poets, Baker's dense but readable study brilliantly reconstructs the central roles of maritime and nautical cultures in Romanticera British literature. In the process, Baker not only puts forward new ideas about the relations between genre, mode, and politics in the period, but also points toward a new critical paradigm for understanding British Romanticism that should nuance and complicate, if not entirely displace, the influential "Romantic imperialism" thesis popularized in the late 1990s.