ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at literary portrayals of the “risk societies” of the North Sea lowlands and explores how these are informed by and contribute to ideas about nationhood and resilience. Novels by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (De to Baronesser, 1848) and the Dutch writer Arthur van Schendel (De Waterman, 1933), written in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, address the way that understanding of a hazardous landscape can be mediated by a particular cultural or religious worldview and sketch out changes in the perceptions of natural agency and human response during the long nineteenth century. The final section of the chapter explores Dutch literary responses to the “Watersnoodramp” flood of 1953.
