From fishery limits to limits to capital: Gendered appropriation and spectres of North Atlantic fishery collapse in The Silver Darlings and Sylvanus Now

This article uncovers a North Atlantic narrative pertaining to the longue-durée crisis of overfishing through Neil Gunn’s novel of the nineteenth-century Scottish herring boom, The Silver Darlings (1941), and Donna Morrissey’s representation of the mid-twentieth century Newfoundland cod boom, Sylvanus Now (2005). Comparing these two novels within a world-ecological framework reveals how aesthetic and plot developments come from the novels’ needs to mediate the dialectical interchange between the uneven modernity of the capitalist world-system and the local relations of the inshore fishery. Through aesthetics and motifs synonymous with silver mining in Gunn’s novel and oil culture in Morrissey’s, the narratives form a cultural critique of capitalist fishery practices, from the local to the global level, over the last 200 years.