Academic Scientific JournalsThe theme of New York in All the Water in the World: An ecolinguistic account
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26881/bp.2026.1.02Keywords:
All the Water in the World, climate change, climate change fiction (cli-fi), flooding, New YorkAbstract
Coastal cities (for instance, New York) are exceptionally vulnerable to the negative consequences of climate change, such as water erosion and flooding. Seemingly, the sad reality of climate change has inspired Eiren Caffall to portray the flooded New York City in her recent dystopian novel All the Water in the World (2025). Given its recency, the theme of New York in All the Water in the World is fairly unexplored in literary and ecolinguistic studies. In this light, the present paper seeks to address the research gap by means of analysing how the theme of New York is represented in All the Water in the World. The representation of the flooded New York in Caffall’s novel is analysed through the prism of an ecolinguistic approach developed by Stibbe (2014, 2015). In the paper, the qualitative ecolinguistic analysis of All the Water in the World reveals that the theme of New York is represented by means of (i) the scientific framing of the issue of climate change; (ii) the over-arching metaphor of human life as the American Museum of Natural History in New York; (iii) backgrounding the antediluvian New York as we know it; and (iv) foregrounding the image of decay. These findings are further presented and expanded upon in the paper.
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