Slavery as a national crime: Defining Britishness in Encounters with the Flying Dutchman

Early British gothic fiction has often been analyzed in terms of the religious, political and cultural oppositions it helps to construct between Britain and the European continent, in particular in Catholic countries like France and Spain. One could argue that the cultural work of Gothic in these cases is to (re)define cultural differences between spaces that are geographically already separate. This division of territorial space is obviously much less clear at sea, and so this raises the question if and how national boundaries and identities are being upheld and transgressed in nautical Gothi... Mehr ...