Reflections and refractions: Anglophone fiction and the Atlantic poetics of water

This volume situates the Atlantic within the Blue Humanities, reframing water as both material force and epistemology. Moving beyond terrestrial paradigms, the essays explore the Atlantic as a dynamic process of circulation, turbulence, and ecological entanglement. Drawing on theorists such as Cohen, DeLoughrey, Mentz, and Neimanis, contributors examine how Anglophone fiction reimagines the ocean as archive, infrastructure, and actor, foregrounding its role in globalization, empire, and climate crisis. The collection charts a trajectory from canonical re-readings of maritime imagination to contemporary reinventions of labor, catastrophe, and ecological precarity, culminating in feminist, posthuman, and archipelagic perspectives. Reflection and refraction serve as guiding metaphors, highlighting literature’s capacity to mirror entanglement with the sea while refracting meaning through liquid instability. Ultimately, the Atlantic emerges as both cradle of modernity and site of its deepest wounds, compelling renewed ecocritical attention to water’s imaginative abundance and ethical urgency.