‘Na ons de Zondvloed’: Remediating Dutch Flood Memory in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Recent scholarship in the fields of ecocriticism and literary studies has increasingly focused on the challenges that arise in the narratological representation of climatological change. That scholarship has, amongst others, focused on the scalar complexities of climate change, in relation to the scale of personal, human life as commonly found in literary fiction. The emergence of climate fiction as a genre led to an increase in theoretical scholarship on climate fiction, often focusing on the scalar complexities of the Anthropocene. The climate crisis has been presented not only as an ecological crisis, but also as a crisis of the imagination, as it challenges the capacities of human thinking, but also the capabilities of traditional fiction. Within the Netherlands, however, the climate crisis also becomes a crisis of cultural identity, as an important element of the Dutch cultural identity is its relationship to water and water management. The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, it presents an overview of how water has become ingrained in Dutch cultural identity, as formalised in the cultural narrative ‘Nederland Waterland.’ Secondly, it argues that any contemporary work of Dutch climate fiction should be seen within the context of that cultural narrative, as contemporary fiction builds upon a centuries-old cultural narrative. As such, it analyses three contemporary works of climate fiction about floods in order to analyse how they remediate the cultural narrative of ‘Nederland Waterland.’ In its analysis, it builds upon a methodological framework around environmental memory, arguing that in its remediation of cultural memory, these novels navigate some of the scalar complexities as highlighted in ecocriticism.