The Voice in the Storm Abstract

English Department | University of Texas | Arlington

Kellie Robertson, University of Maryland

Drawing on the work of Amitav Ghosh and Bruno Latour, the article examines the intersection of premodern narrative and environmental phenomena in order to argue that literary texts form an essential part of the paleoarchaeological record. It focuses on several case studies that document natural disasters in the Little Ice Age, including the unsettled weather leading up to the so-called Great Famine beginning in 1315; a mid-fourteenth century storm that swept across the North Sea; and a seventeenth-century lightning strike on a rural Cheshire church. While different in scale, these meteorological events all generate textual traces marked by “environmental prosopopoeia,” a rhetorical strategy that lends voice to contemporary moral concerns through the nonhuman agents of wind and rain. The Latourian concept of “bionarrativity” explains how stories of extreme weather determine (and, in some cases, limit) the types of meanings that get attached to them. Textual accounts of natural disasters do not just provide formal containers for describing an event after the fact, but rather serve as the pre-exiting hermeneutic nexus in which we experience weather events as they are happening. Taken together, these early accounts form a disaster archive, wherein intertwined human and natural agencies challenge modern distinctions between natural and anthropogenic causation.