Among global environments, the undersea is unique in the challenges it poses - and the opportunities it affords - for sensation, perception, inquiry, and imagination. The Aesthetics of the Undersea charts a history of the subaqueous in Western culture, from the early modern period to the present.

Introduction: Submarine Aesthetics 1. The Aesthetics of the Early Modern Grotto and the Advent of an Empirical Nature 2. The Porcellaneous Ocean: Matter and Meaning in the Rococo Undersea 3. The Logic of the Invisible: Perceiving the Submarine World in French Enlightenment Geography 4. Understanding the Loss of Colour 5. Hydromania: The Social History and Literary Significance of Romantic Swimming 6. The Great Melancholy Mother: Michelet's Evolutionary Ocean in The Sea 7. "The Forsaken Merman," "The Little Mermaid," and Early Modernism: Undersea Imagery for the Dissociation and Dissolution of Culture 8. Encountering Living Corals: A Nineteenth-Century Scientist and Artist Reveals the Underwater Realm 9. Frank Hurley and the Symbolic Underwater 10. The Shipwreck of Reason: The Surrealist Diver and Modern Maritime Salvage 11. The Shipwreck as Undersea Gothic 12. Deep Time & Myriad Ecosystems: Urban Biotic Imaginaries and Unstable Planetary Aesthetics 13. Siren and Silent Song: Evolution and Extinction in the Submarine 14.The Ocean Hospital - a Walk around the Ward