While not referring unequivocally to anthropogenic climate change, Weerwater and Vloed offer important insights into literature’s complex interaction with climate change and rising water levels in the way they draw attention to the language in which traumatic experience is couched, as well as by highlighting the enduring flexibility of novelistic form to evoke our changing relationship to the environment.”

We approach the flood tropes in these novels as examples of indeterminate allegory, in which multiple layers of meaning invite competing possible readings. “This article examines two contemporary flood novels originating from the Low Countries: Weerwater (Dorrestein 2015) by the Dutch author Renate Dorrestein and Vloed (‘Flood’ Six 2012) by the Flemish author Roderik Six. Published in Green Letters (ahead of print).Ī free eprint (for the first 50 users) can be found here:įrom the Introduction of “flooded cities”: Its with mixed feelings that I announce the publication of my latest article, written in collaboration with Stef Craps from Ghent University: Flooded cities in Low Countries fiction: Referentiality and indeterminate allegory in Renate Dorrestein’s Weerwater and Roderik Six’s Vloed. With much of the world in quarantine or lock-down, questions of how we come to terms with catastrophe have not exactly become any less topical.

The last city on earth: Almere in Weerwater.

Weerwater by Renate Dorrestein