Literary Storytelling and the Environmental Crisis of the Oceans

With particular focus on more-than-human experience, this creative-critical book explores the role of literary storytelling in representing and communicating the oceanic environmental crisis.

While investigating the creative potential of scholarship in material ecocriticism and the blue humanities, this book not only examines the theoretical tools needed, but also develops the poetic and creative role of scholarship in imagining a livable oceanic future. To overcome anthropocentric views of nature, it argues that a fluid and more-than-human literary form is needed. This is developed in the book as a ‘jellyfish poetics’: a literary structuring device based on the jellyfish life cycle. The book not only theorises this new form, but also enacts it, presenting original and innovative research that embodies a synthesis between creative and scholarly approaches. With its main focus being more-than-human experience of oceanic environmental issues, central case studies are jellyfish, ecological depletion in the North Sea and recent nature-based Dutch water management.

This is an important book for scholars interested in the intersection of blue humanities and creative writing as well as the wider environmental humanities. Additionally, it is relevant to practitioners, writers and educators who grapple with the challenge of representing environmental crisis.