Floods

This chapter examines literary representations of apocalyptic floods in British culture to interrogate the relationship between the particular and the universal in the stories we tell about flooding. Eva Horn describes climate change as a ‘catastrophe without event’, since it ‘does not take place at a specific point in time and space’; she writes that ‘we can conceive of climate only in the form of weather events’, a miscomprehension of the temporal and geographic scale of climate change. In the British apocalyptic imaginary, floods that do take place at a specific point in time and space are deeply associated with the universal flood described in the book of Genesis; this repeated association between the particular and the universal means that fictional floods may serve as a synecdoche for the catastrophe without event that is climate change. I establish this possibility principally through analysis of the deluge in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674) and the tragic flood that occurs at the end of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). The chapter also traces the shifting understanding of ‘the deluge’ and ‘apocalypse’ between the early modern and Victorian periods, with some discussion of Romantic apocalypse and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826). The contemporary relevance of these foundational flood narratives is first demonstrated by a more recent flood text: Megan Hunter’s novel The End We Start From (2017).