Above the Ocean

The article presents Rakel Haslund Gjerrild’s novel Alle himlens fugle (2020) as a Scandinavian example of flood fiction, a genre that has been attracting scholarly attention in recent years. After a short outline of the current discourse on flood fiction, the novel will be analyzed with a focus on its depiction of the ocean and its intertextual dimensions. I will argue that Alle himlens fugle renders a paradox by showing the precarity of cultural artifacts, especially language, in the Anthropocene on the one hand, while promoting the durability of canonical works of fiction on the other. This paradox makes it fruitful in the context of blue humanities approaches.