The Destruction of Amsterdam: Flood Allegories in Contemporary Dutch Literature

Abstract

This article examines representations of urban destruction and of rising<br/>waters in Pieter Boskma’s Tsunami in de Amstel (2016) and in Guido van<br/>Driel’s De ondergang van Amsterdam (2007). It foregrounds the ways in which<br/>these texts reflect productively on visualisations and narrative frames of catastrophe, and how they propose alternative temporalities (in the case of Boskma) and alternative visual perspectives (in van Driel) for imagining possible urban endtimes. At the background of this article is an increased tendency in ecocritical approaches to read representations of destructive climate change (in prose literature, in particular) in terms of their implications for understanding real-world radical climatological and environmental change. Such perspectives are complemented here with an examination of allegorical readings of flood in a poetry collection and graphic novel.