Underwater Lives

Exploring the changing relations between humans, marine beings and oceans as captured in the autobiographical writings of divers, sea-species biographers and underwater photographers over the last hundred years, Underwater Lives takes a deep dive beneath the surface to reveal what they can tell us about this wonderful and increasingly endangered world.

With alarm bells ringing about the sustainability of humans’ interaction with the oceans, Underwater Lives asks, what can we learn from an underwater world seen through divers’ eyes? What ideas are at work and play? How is oceanic knowledge spread? How is the ocean ‘seen’ through immersive texts? How do contemporary underwater life writers engage with the destruction of the Anthropocene?

Reading texts and images together, and sometimes against each other, Clare Brant investigates how life writing operates underwater, how particular visual conventions shape what we see, how literature partners with other arts to convey ocean life and what underwater life writings have to say about the entangled politics of human engagement with ocean lives. Structured around the lives of humans, marine beings and the ocean itself, Underwater Lives is a pioneering study of how people represent underwater. You might expect to meet William Beebe, Hans and Lotte Hass, Jacques Cousteau, Eugenie Clark, Rachel Carson, Sylvia Earle and you do; you meet scientists who share their lives with whales, sharks, octopus, seals, turtles, corals and fish; you meet image-makers involved in the BBC’s documentary series Blue Planet I and II; you also encounter all sorts of people who simply went underwater and wrote about it.

Joining the growing domain of blue humanities, Underwater Lives brings literary, historical and aesthetic thinking to the ocean as it has been seen through human eyes - and their prosthetics: cameras.