Maritime English in Classical Literature

Pozharska D. Maritime English in Classical Literature : bachelor’s thesis : 035 Philology / supervised by N. Skybytska. Kyiv, 2025. 76 р.

This paper is dedicated to the analysis of the use of Maritime English in classical Anglophone fiction of the 18th–20th centuries. Within the scope of the research, Maritime English is examined as a lexical-semantic field that actively functions within literary texts and reflects the genre-specific characteristics of the works. Given the multifaceted nature of maritime themes in literature, the study identifies four major narrative genres: whaling narratives, pirate narratives, sea voyage narratives, and naval warfare narratives.
The research analyzes eight significant literary works, including Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, The Red Rover by James Fenimore Cooper, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Children on the Sea by Joseph Conrad, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, The Pilot by James Fenimore Cooper, and Mr. Midshipman Easy by Frederick Marryat. The main focus was on identifying key maritime terms, analyzing their structural features, frequency of use, role in narrative construction, and their interrelations within the lexical-semantic field of maritime adventure.
Through descriptive, comparative, lexical-semantic, and quantitative analyses, the study classifies 122 maritime terms and correlates them with the genre-specific features of the analyzed texts.
The work consists of two chapters: theoretical and practical. The results of the research reveal both genre-related and quantitative features of maritime literature.