Michael Titlestad is Personal Professor in the Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has published widely in the fields of South African literature, apocalypticism, whiteness and jazz. He is the author of Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage and is the co-editor (with David Watson) of The Ongoing End: The Limits of Apocalyptic Narrative. He is also the editor of English Studies in Africa, the most widely read literary studies journal in South Africa.

Situates the study of shipwrecks in the larger frame of the environmental humanities

Traces both the historical and representational examples of shipwreck

Utilizes personal experience to illustrate how tropes are used in maritime literature

1. Introduction.- Part I. Historical Narratives.- 2. An Incidental Dystopia: The Wreck of the Batavia (1629).- 3. Captain of a Shipwreck: The Wreck of the Wager (1741).- 4. The Limits of the Law: The Wreck of the Grosvenor (1791).- 5. Remembering William Mackay: The Wreck of the Juno (1795).- 6. The Cannibals and the Butterfly: The Wreck of the Medusa (1816).- 7. King Baba's Largesse: The Wreck of the Winterton (1792).- Part II. Representations.- 8. James F. Cobb and Daphne du Maurier in Cornwall.- 9. Stephen Crane and James Hanley's Open Boats .- 10. Proximity in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat.- 11. John Steinbeck's 'Lifeboat': An Unfinished Journey 12.- Making Room: The Lifeboat, an Invidious Motif.- 13. The Inner Wreck in Sheila Fugard's The Castaways 143 Coda.- 14. Soundings: Gavin Bryars and Brian Eno's Titanics.- 15. Politics in Hans Magnus Enzensberger's The Sinking of the Titanic.- 16. 'The Endlessly Sinking Ship': Günter Grass's Crabwalk.- 17. Regarding Lampedusa.- [...] McInnes's Urban Wreck.- 19. Constructive Wrecks.- 20. Postscript: Thinking from the Sea.