Writing water justice in the twenty-first century: Environmental novels, neoliberalism, and water politics
Date
2023-03-30Embargo Date
2025-03-29
Author
Cahillane, Ashley
Metadata
Show full item recordUsage
This item's downloads: 0 (view details)
Abstract
This thesis poses drought as a literary problem. It analyses seven different twenty first-century novels which respond to drought events as a way of articulating culturally and
historically specific anxieties surrounding human-created climate change and global
ecological destruction. These novels are: Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed (2005);
Karen Jayes’s For the Mercy of Water (2012); Dominique Botha’s False River (2013); Claire
Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus (2015); Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015); Mike
McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016); and Mary Costello’s The River Capture (2019). Using
ecocritical and ecofeminist approaches, I argue that these novels both require and provide a
means of engaging critically with water and environmental politics. They show an emphasis
on freshwater’s value to the human body, which can be connected to ecofeminist reckonings
with the feminisation and subordination of the body, emotions, care work, the material world,
and nature in Western culture. Moreover, these texts connect the body to larger scales of
economy, ecology, and society; their representations of infrastructure failure, climate
change, privatisation, dispossession, over-extraction, among a host of other water-related
problems, prompt thinking about how water crises are manufactured by the historical and
current disregard and exploitation of nature and people under global capitalism.
Embracing the biological, sensory, political, and ecological value of freshwater, I also
investigate how water-inspired formal experimentation in these novels challenges (or
reinforces) the gendered human/nature and mind/body dualisms that so often dominates the
novel form. The novel form has a history of privileging individual psychological development
against inert environments, yet some of these texts construct narrative forms that convey
human embodiment and subjectivity as collective, more-than-human, political, and
contingent on environmental conditions. My contention is that freshwater itself pushes the
novel form in more ecologically- and socially-just directions.