AISCLI Webinar Series 2025. Angelo Monaco presents his book “Water Stories in the Anthropocene”. Respondent Lucio De Capitani. April 4, 2025, 5 p.m.

About the Book and the Author

Water Stories in the Anthropocene (2025) explores how climate change has emerged as a major theme in our daily lives as it poses a myriad of economic, scientific, political and cultural challenges in the age of the Anthropocene. In all its forms and manifestations, climate change is primarily a water crisis. Water scarcity, droughts, floods, deluge, rising sea levels, ice melting, wetlands loss and sea pollution are among the main threats posed by climate change, wreaking havoc on both human and nonhuman forms of life. This book engages with instances of extreme events related to water (droughts, floods, deluges) and the impact of climate change on some waterbodies (seas and wetlands) in contemporary Anglophone novels. By taking into account a corpus of novels ranging from the various areas of the Anglophone world, and thus shuttling between the Global North and the Global South, the book reads these novels as “water stories.” This volume pays attention to the pervasive presence of water in all aspects of our lives, thus showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis. Alternating between an econarratological perspective, reflections on the Anthropocene and the human/nonhuman imbrications within the blue humanities, the book contributes significantly to the considerations of the imaginative possibilities of these water stories, showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis.

Angelo Monaco, Ph.D. from the University of Pisa (2017), is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bari “Aldo Moro.” He is a section editor of the journal Postcolonial Text. He specialises in contemporary South Asian and British literature and his primary lines of research include environmental concerns, trauma studies, globalisation studies and postcolonialism. He is the author of Jhumpa Lahiri. Vulnerabilità e resilienza (ETS, 2019).

The Respondent

Lucio De Capitani is Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy.  His research interests include colonial and postcolonial literatures in English (in particular the works of Amitav Ghosh and Robert Louis Stevenson), world literature theories, ecocriticism and the relationships between anthropology and literary studies.  He has recently published  the “Introduction” to  Venezia e l’Antropocene, Wetlands (2022), and Ethnographic Narratives as World Literature. Uneven Entanglements in European and South Asian Writing,  Palgrave Macmillan (2023).