From the Mesolithic to the Anthropocene. Environmental Fiction Put to the Test of the Scientific Imagination in Doggerland by Elisabeth Filhol
In the novel Doggerland (2019), Élisabeth Filhol stages scientists working on a flooded territory in the North Sea. She thus narrativizes scientific knowledge and connects it to a political discourse, while questioning the epistemological role of literature. This article analyzes this complex articulation, showing, through the tools of ecopoetics, the specificity of the literary means employed to provide a novel visual angle on the environmental crisis. It also explores the complementarity links between literature and science through an investigation of imagination, highlighting the porosity between scientific objectivity and novelistic fiction.