Pollution
Upon starting this atlas, one of the primary objectives was to determine whether the perception
of the beach as site of leisure and holiday had changed throughout the long twentieth century.
Considering the growing awareness of global warming and climate change throughout this period,
we were curious to see whether this was reflected in literature on the beach. While our findings
indicate an increase in descriptions of polluted beaches, particularly from the 2000s onward,
the overall number of texts explicitly mentioning pollution is relatively low and even when it
does appear, it does not necessarily alter the mood of these scenes significantly.
Interestingly, none of the texts in our Mediterranean sample explicitly refer to the pollution
of littoral space. This opens up interesting questions concerning the aesthetic and narrative
effects of foregrounding or hiding pollution in literary representations. Furthermore, it
suggests that despite a slight increase in the depiction of polluted beaches, the perception of
the beach as a space of leisure remains largely unchanged.