Blue Humanities: an ecocritical reading of Hans Christian Andersen THE LITTLE MERMAID

The sea has always challenged the minds and imaginations of men, oceanographers and sailors. Even in present-days, the sea remains the last great and unknown frontier of the Earth Planet. Hence, the sea can be seen as a strange and dangerous place, as well as an alien and wild place, leading to its mysteriousness. Historically, we cast the ocean as the wildest nature, the unpredictable; but, in the same breath, we cast the ocean as a place of salvation. Since the oceans and their changing conditions were the main topic of research in the hydro-criticism field, they have been extensively studied by many oceanographers but also by a new interdisciplinary field; the BLUE HUMANITIES. The emerge of the term is attributed to Steve Mentz, who, in one of his articles “Towards a Blue Cultural Studies”, emphasize the new developments regarding the marine studies, that called “blue cultural studies”. Four years later, John R. Gillis, published an article titled “Blue Humanities”, addressing the term to the field that combines oceanography, limnology, social science and environmental humanities. In the Blue Humanities, the sea is envisioned both as a geopolitical agency and as a symbolic domain marked by the intersecting stories of the Anthropocene seas, social practices, and cultural forces. At the beginning, the sea narratives were for the majority drawn from customary western discursive maps within the colonialist mindset; but over the years, the Blue Humanities has become more focused to knowledges and narratives of non-western water cultures, enabling the batter understanding of the role of global capitalism at the bottom of the decline of oceanic and hydrological system. This thesis will explore in detail the role of the Blue Humanities, by presenting an exhaustive overview of this new interdisciplinary field. The second part of the paper will focus on the ecocritical analysis of the seas through the literature and narratives during the centuries focusing on the ecocritical perspective. The third section will be dedicated to the representation of the non-human inhabitants of the seas and oceans focusing the attention on the mythological figure of the mermaid. The last section of the thesis will contain the ecocritical analysis of Hans Christian Andersen’s book THE LITTLE MERMAID.