Waterland essays and criticism

Tom notices a bruise on the body, finds a telltale beer bottle in the rushes, and Tom's girlfriend Mary insists Freddie was killed by Dick, Tom's mentally retarded brother.

In his essay, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” William Rueckertdefines ecocriticism as “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study ofliterature, because ecology (as a science, as a discipline, as the basis for human vision) has thegreatest relevance to the present and future of the world” (1996:107).

Plot Summary. Waterland begins with the narrator Tom Crick describing his childhood growing up in the low-lying fens area of eastern England. His father is a lock-keeper, and they live in a cottage by the River Leem. One day in July 1943, the drowned body of a local boy, Freddie Parr, floats down the river.

At once a philosophical meditation on the meaning of history and a gothic family saga, Waterland is a tightly interwoven novel that entertains as it provokes. Graham (Colin) Swift was born May 4, 1949, in London, England, the son of Allan Stanley and Sheila Irene (Bourne) Swift.