Ecofeminist drought and slow ecological grief in Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed

Cahillane, Ashley (2025) Ecofeminist drought and slow ecological grief in Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed. Green Letters, 28 (4). pp. 341-354. ISSN 1468-8417

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Abstract

This article analyses temporalities of drought and grief in an understudied millennial Australian novel: Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed. Watershed depicts a young white farming couple in rural Victoria battling a fierce drought while coping with prolonged grief over the death of their ten-year-old son. I contend that the layering of drought and grief in the text–both figured as slow forms of crisis–proffer slow temporalities that deal with both the small and large scales of space and time which constitute anthropogenic climate change. Using hydrocritical, postcolonial, and ecofeminist approaches, I show how the text articulates a politicised multiscalar yet embodied perspective which demonstrates the insights that a specifically freshwater approach to the blue humanities can bring to theorisations of environmental time and narrative strategy during planetary crisis.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	The bulk of the research for this article was carried out during my PhD at the Discipline of English, University of Galway. I would like to thank my PhD supervisor, Professor Lionel Pilkington, as well as colleagues and mentors at Galway (including Dr Nessa Cronin and Professor Patrick Lonergan) for reading early versions of this work and for their ongoing support. The article was further developed at University College Dublin, and thanks to mentors and colleagues there. Thanks to the attendees of the panel session where I first presented this work at the ASLE-UKI Biennial Conference at Northumbria University, 2022. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer of this article.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	australian eco-fiction,blue humanities,climate change fiction,ecofeminism,hydrofiction,postcolonial ecocriticism,literature and literary theory,sdg 13 - climate action,sdg 15 - life on land ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1200/1208
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Global Development (formerly School of International Development)
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	01 Dec 2025 15:30
Last Modified:	01 Dec 2025 15:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/101172
DOI:	10.1080/14688417.2024.2441254

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