Ocean Liners and Modern Literature, with Faye Hammill

How does the ocean liner of the late 19th and early 20th centuries differ from the modern cruise ship? What does it mean to thinking about the ocean liner as a form of ‘passenger shipping’ rather than ‘cruising’ and how does this call attention to the ways human movement becomes absorbed into regimes of capital and nationhood? And how might ocean liner literature help us to examine the role of nostalgia in narratives of infrastructure tragedies?

In this episode of the Thinking Through Infrastructure podcast, Reed Puc sat down with Faye Hammill, Professor of English Literature and Canadian Studies at the University of Glasgow. They discussed Faye’s newest book, Ocean Liners and Modern Literature, which is available through Liverpool University Press and is Open Access thanks to funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The conversation explored a broad range ‘ocean liner literatures’, probed the differences between an ocean liner novel and the railway novel and the road novel previously discussed on the podcast, and considered the sometimes prophetic nature of ocean liner literatures and our relationship with infrastructural disasters.

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