Literary Studies and the Seabed
Dr Laurence Publicover, Associate Professor in Literature and Oceanic Studies (University of Bristol)
‘Unless you are given to chronic anxiety or suffer from nihilistic despair’, wrote Wil S. Hylton in 2020, ‘you probably haven’t spent much time contemplating the bottom of the ocean.’
Much has changed since then. Attacks on seabed infrastructure, including pipelines and communications cables, are increasingly making the news in an era of hybrid warfare, while the Trump administration is controversially supporting the commercial mining of polymetallic nodules deep in the Pacific Ocean. On the horizon is a new wave of deep-sea habitats, while pharmaceutical companies trawl hydrothermal vents for materials from which to develop ground-breaking treatments.
What does literary studies have to say about all this? Hylton’s tongue-in-cheek remark offers one clue. Analysing literature set on the seabed – or deploying images of it – can help us think about how humans have responded, emotionally and imaginatively, to this region of our planet.
Literary scholars are beginning to argue that the language we use to talk about the ocean floor reveals our (often misplaced) assumptions about it, and that cultural perceptions of the seabed have shaped human interventions there. A book to be published late in 2026 by the University of Chicago Press’s series ‘Oceans in Depth’ will offer the fullest account to date of the human history of the seabed, demonstrating how imaginative literature has not only reflected, but frequently inspired, human activity in the deep.
So-called ‘ocean literacy’ should involve more than understanding the science of the sea; it should, these
scholars argue, require us to think about how we think about the sea, in literature and beyond – and about the implications of these modes of thought for the future of human-seabed relations.
