Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- 2 New Histories - Old Metaphor -- 2.1 New Histories: Postmodernism, Literature, and the Study of History -- 2.2 Old Metaphor: The Maritime Metaphor in Literature -- 3 Wavering Biographies: Remembering Individual Histories -- 3.1 The Odd Discipline of Autobiography: Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea(1978) -- 3.2 Life Course as a Ship's Course: Candia McWilliam's Debatable LAnd (1994) -- 3.3 Small Men at Big History: Graham Swift's Last Orders (1996) and lan McEwan's On Chesil Beath (2007) -- 3.4 Seaing through Biographies -- 4 Salvaging the Self: Narratives of Personal Trauma -- 4.1 In Search of a Life Line: Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2002) -- 4.2 Plotting a Course in the Sea of Memory: John Banville's The Sea (2005) -- 4.3 Seaing through Trauma -- 5 Influential Sources: Discourses of Origin and the Politics of Power -- 5.1 Historiographic Darwinism and Ark-ology: Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters (1989) -- 5.2 His and Her Stories: Jeanette Winterson's Lighthousekeeping (2004) and Doris Lessing's The Cleft (2007) -- 5.3 History in the Making: Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger (1992) -- 5.4 Seaing through Origins -- 6 Reclaiming the Drowned: Post/Colonial Histories -- 6.1 Rewriting Insular Classics: J.M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and Marina Warner's Indigo or Mapping the Waters (1992) -- 6.2 The Sea is Slavery: Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts (1997) -- 6.3 Colonialism in a Ship-Shell: Matthew Kneale's English Passengers (2000) -- 6.4 Seaing through Post/Colonialism -- 7 Conclusion -- List of Abbreviations -- Works Cited -- Index.