Literary Narratives on Climate in the Early Modern Age (Mediterranean and Iberorromance Literatures)
In her presentation "Literary Narratives on Climate in the Early Modern Age", Claudia García-Minguillán Torres, who is currently a Fellow in the faculty's specialisation area Trans-Mediterranean Entanglements gave an exciting insight into her new research project on climate change and natural disasters in older Romance literatures. She raised the stimulating and provocative question of whether literary texts contain concrete approaches for dealing with devastating natural events, focussing on the epic poem La Riada (1784) by the Spanish author Cándido María Trigueros, which is dedicated to the great flood in Seville at the turn of the year 1783/84. Claudia García-Minguillán Torres placed this historical crisis event and its literary treatment in a suggestive comparative context with the flood catastrophe in the Mediterranean coastal city of Valencia in autumn 2024. This led to a very lively discussion in which the audience and the speaker exchanged views on the ways in which natural disasters are experienced, perceived and portrayed in literature and in the real world, which are certainly subject to historical change.