Submerged Surroundings: The Use of Maps in Contemporary Flood Fiction
Submerged Surroundings: The Use of Maps in Contemporary Flood Fiction

Summary/Abstract: Flooding is a major factor in current and future environmental emergencies caused by anthropogenic climate change—for example in the form of rising sea levels or extreme weather events. The flood is also one of the most culturally recognizable and relatable tropes through which climate change has been mediated in Western literature and film for the last half century (Trexler 2015). Flooding, real or fictional, exposes the ambivalence of humanity’s relationship with water, and serves as a reminder of the dynamic nature of our surrounding landscapes. Contemporary flood fiction, whether in the form of literature, film or TV, tends to depict and address questions of place, place attachment and change, which are highly relevant to understanding the emergencies facing the more-than-human world in the Anthropocene. In this article, I examine one specific aspect of this tendency: the function of the non-authorial, extradiegetic map in contemporary flood fiction. Using a discussion about how to understand the inclusion of visual maps in literary fiction in relation to the concepts of paratext, imagetext and illustration as a point of departure, I examine the relationship between the visual map and literary narrative in two Swedish flood novels. I question what role these maps play in the mediation of environmental disasters or climate change, especially in relation to genre, the spatiality of the novels’ storyworlds, and the interplay between image and text, and suggest some further explorations on this topic where interdisciplinary efforts combining intermedial and literary studies might be especially fruitful.

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