Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

The shore defies definition. The shore deconstructs and rebuilds, is the beginning or end of a journey, initiates or stops mobility. Here survivors of shipwrecks, like Robinson Crusoe, escape their death; and the weary and tired, like Max Morden, wade back into the womb of nature. The shore is transformation spatialized. Still the coast as literary setting is more than a decorative space. Its utopian/dystopian nature, its liminality and ambiguity invite transgressions of various kinds, which undermine any notion of stable and fixed borders and boundaries. The littoral is liminal, a third space that contests and deconstructs epistemic certainties. This study illustrates this paradigmatic nature of shorelines from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest to John Banville’s The Sea.