"Breaking the waves"

This volume shows how literature and art reveal unsuspected properties of water. The myths and legends that water and the sea have generated (the Flood, the voyages of Ulysses and Aeneas, the mermaids, the ocean as an old man, Proteus or Nereus, Ophelia, the white whale) resound like a reservoir of forms and themes that today’s verbal and visual arts have seized upon. The texts gathered here, signed by renowned specialists as well as young researchers, academics and creators, have the merit of taking a fresh look at a substance whose value in our lives has been forgotten, and help build an essential ecological reflection. Unpredictable and untamable, moving or stagnant, water, as a representative challenge, receives here the attention it deserves, and becomes once again an eau-de-vie.