‘Nothing Ever Really Vanishes’

A Prescription for Imperialised Eyes in Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020)

Bibliographic Data

ID21722342
AuthorsLhutu Keyho (North Eastern Hill University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume29
Issue1
Pages48-63
Publication date2025-01-02
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGreen Letters (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1468-8417 • E-ISSN: 2168-1414
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14688417.2025.2532500
OpenAlexW4412197781
LanguageEN
References cited24

Richard Flanagan’s writings seek to reveal the links between global environmental crises and exploitative colonial attitudes. By critiquing dominant human perceptions of nature, he proposes alternative ways of seeing that resist denigration and exploitation, pointing instead to the possibility of healing and renewal. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) exemplifies this endeavour by challenging dominant narratives, while rearticulating the non-human and reanimating its operations as deeply embedded in the making of the history of communities, of both the human and the non-human. This paper examines how the novel attempts to prescribe a ground where such a healing of eyes could occur, imperialised as they are by narratives in whose face even the activism of portentous movements is rendered ineffective. It also contributes to scholarship on Flanagan’s oeuvre, examining how the novel fulfils the imperative within the realm of literary studies to actively engage with environmental concerns

Art · Art history · Epistemology · Medical prescription · Nothing · Psychoanalysis · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Irish and British Studies · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology

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