“The marsh did not confine them but defined them”. An Ecocritical Analysis of Waterscapes in Contemporary Anglophone Environmental Narratives

The history of humankind is entrenched in a broad system of physical, intellectual, and affective interconnections that includes the other-than-human aquatic ecosystems. Both soothing and destructive, hospitable and dangerous, transparent and obscure, water reveals its poiesis in contemporary environmental narratives. While saltwater locations have received substantial attention in critical ocean studies, freshwater literary ecosystems are still significantly underexplored. This article seeks to broaden the scope of the Blue Humanities field and investigate the peculiar freshwater system of wetlands and marshes. By providing an ecocritical analysis of the novels The Hungry Tide (Ghosh, 2004) and Where the Crawdads Sing (Owens, 2018), the article will argue that wetlands and marshes serve metonymically as heterotopic spaces where inter- and intra-specific differences intersect and merge, and where both physical and symbolic boundaries are crossed. Wetlands and marshes foster collective identity, support unconventional gender identities, and serve as spaces for relational thinking, self-development, and resilience.