Flooded Futures: The Representation of the Anthropocene in Twenty-First-Century British Flood Fictions

Abstract

This article presents a subset of twenty-first-century British novels and defines them as flood fictions. Through their depiction of climate crisis floods, novels such as Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, Clare Morrall’s When the Floods Came, and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army constitute a major imaginative response to climate change.Flood fictions as I define them are characterized by two features: first, the depiction of floods as an effect of and synecdoche for climate crisis, making use in particular of the historical and visual connotations of floods; and, second, the depiction of the literal submersion of the narratives themselves by means of language erosion and narrative fragmentation. As such, flood fictions tackle some of the imaginative and representative challenges posed by the Anthropocene. My reading of these novels provides an intervention in current debates on imagining and narrating climate crisis and presents a previously unexplored and underexplored subset of literary works.

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