Hydrological Narratology: Materiality and the Metamodern Structure of Feeling in Graham Swift and Amitav Ghosh

This article develops “hydro-reading” as an ecocritical methodology that translates water’s material properties into replicable operations of narrative analysis. Grounded in a “triple-evidence principle” – requiring the complete critical itinerary to achieve closure across three narrative levels (story, discourse, and image/metaphor networks) – the methodology identifies four operative concepts: liquidity, permeability, circularity, and dissolution-recrystallization. These are applied to Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004). The readings demonstrate that water’s narrative function in contemporary Anglophone fiction oscillates between dissolution and repair, a tension that exhibits a structural correspondence with metamodernism’s structure of feeling without positing a linear historical shift. The article concludes by proposing hydro-reading as a mode of critical practice that privileges attunement, accretive attention, and openness to surprise over suspicion – not as a defensive concession, but as a deliberate epistemological stance shaped by the material logics it studies.