Paper short abstract:

To understand the environmental shift in the history of rivers and the declining model of fighting with rivers and disciplining them through modern hydroengineering, this paper reconstructs some warning signs flooding rivers transmit to us via literary sources and monstrous historiography in Europe.

Paper long abstract:

What stories do rivers tell when they flood and what stories do humans believe in they tell? Rivers’ symbolic functions are deeply embedded in European literary traditions, providing insights into their historical significance. However, the modern history of the global hydromorphological and hydraulic transformation of rivers (18th-20th centuries), including major European arteries, has not been juxtaposed with their monstrous literary accounts on flood events.

The phenomenon of ‘millennium’ or ‘unprecedented’ floods, which occur and escalate once per century (e.g., the Vistula’s floods in 1813/1844; the Neva’s 1824; the Danube’s 1838/1926; the Seine, Aar, Morava, and others’ 1910; Thames 1928, the Vistula-Dunajec’s 1934; the Odra, Vistula, and others’ 1947; the Rhine’s 1995 or the Odra-Nysa’s 1997), is now being explained in climate science. Rising sea levels necessitate a re-evaluation of epistemic models regarding the modern management of rivers. By examining the unconquered and undisciplined rivers through literature, this paper will activate the historiosophical and non-anthropocentric contexts that have been marginalized in the reconstruction of modern Europe’s flood history.

By incorporating literary sources, like the powerful narrative of the animated Danube in The Willows (1907) by A. Blackwood, this paper aims to distort the symbolic and realistic representation of modern rivers and show how the monstrous is inevitable part of flood narratives. Exploring how rivers are depicted as powerful entities in flood events, distinct from modern constructs, will challenge the global anthropocentric historiography and revitalize the knowledge preserved in literary works about rivers conceptualized as real natural elements beyond human control.