Frontières liquides : l’eau dans les romans de la terre au Luxembourg

While the earth usually represents the element in which cultural attachment is
rooted, water on the contrary reveals what exceeds or interpenetrates the land. The liquid
element is as ambiguous as it is proteiform: vital and destructive at the same time, it sometimes
is a figure of liberation, sometimes of tragic dissolution. In a corpus of Luxembourgish
novels from the early 20th century, this paper will analyse the depictions of water, mostly
in its opposition with the soil, in order to question the meaning of the liquid element in a
context where, corollary to social, economic and political changes, the earth is generally
dominant in discourse and imagination. If nature has mostly been confined to the local and
cultural landscape, an eco-material reading highlights on the contrary a global and crossborder
dimension inherent to nature, but also to culture, disregarding the map-drawn
boundaries that define the individual and the collective. Finally, a sensitive, anthropoetical
reading also challenges historical, contextual and fictional frames. The materiality of the
liquid element is not just a metaphor: it shapes natural, as well as textual environments.