Teeming with fresh perspectives and original insights, this is a treasure chest of essays on literature's pirates'. John Peck, author of Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719-1917 '... this is a rewarding volume of essays on subjects both remote and familiar. Piracy is the common thread, but the prominence of themes of imperialism, copyright and print history, spectacle and popular culture, and gender and sexuality, make of the book a veritable treasure trove for the reader interested in a broad canvas of (mostly transatlantic) nineteenth-century cultural history.
- Review 19
The sophistication of Thompson's analysis does justice to a writer whose 'individualism has proven hard for recent critics to stomach' (215), and exemplifies the capacity of meticulous close reading to breathe new critical life into the nineteenth century's not-so-childish-after-all pirates.
- Review of English Studies
... fills a major gap in the scholarly literature on piracy and offers an admirable complement to, inter alia, Claire Jowitt's The Culture of Piracy...
- Victorian Studies
Reminding us of the indebtedness of our conceptions of the pirate to the likes of Byron and Stevenson, this collection will no doubt have something to offer anyone interested in nineteenth-century renderings of the pirate, his villainy, and, perhaps especially, his subversive heroism.
- Sara Malton, Saint Mary's University