Visioni dalle wetlands. Ambiguità e liminalità in Waterland di Graham Swift

This chapter intends to explore the liminal nature of wetlands. These spaces emerge as ambivalent sites not only from an ecological perspective, but also from a cultural one, as they represent a convergence of oblivion and rebirth, good and evil. Specifically, this contribution analyses the liminal quality of the Fenlands, a wetland area in eastern England, as depicted in Graham Swift’s novel Waterland (1983). The first part of the essay examines various representations of wetlands within the broader landscape of English-language literature. The second section focuses on the multifaceted nature of the Fenlands, where history, fairy tale, and geological time coexist. The essay aims to demonstrate how Waterland investigates both the moral landscapes of human experience and the material environment of the wetland space, ultimately offering a vision in which a shared fragility between human beings and their surrounding physical landscape comes to the fore.