Migration
The beach has long been associated with movement and travel. We were particularly interested in
the different effects of voluntary (such as tourism) and involuntary (such as exile). Our
original hypothesis was that migration and exile would feature prominently both earlier in the
century, in literature written during WWII, and towards the end of the long twentieth century.
However, in our corpus, migration and exile only begin to appear as relevant themes in the
1990s, with an (expected) peak related to the Mediterranean refugee crisis in contemporary texts
written since 2010. Additionally, migration and exile play a role in the passage from water to
land and vice-versa in merfolk literature. Often, aquatic and terrestrial environments are
juxtaposed as opposite worlds, and the characters’ transition is usually final. The beach
functions as an important threshold in these instances, since any crossing of the line between
land and water is always both an arrival and a departure. A physical transformation frequently
emphasises the potential painfulness of such an adaptation to a new environment.