“From Tiber to ThAImes”: An Eco-Critical Approach to Literary Rivers from Shakespeare to AI-generated Art

As a response to the recent trend of Blue Ecocriticism, this article surveys a selection of riverine waterscapes in English literature, with a particular focus on – but not limited to – early modern works by Shakespeare, John Taylor, and Michael Drayton. Their literary waterscapes display a pastoralapocalypse dichotomy: rivers are either idealised in an Edenic vision or presented in realistic terms, as mirrors of human negligence and socioeconomical exploitation. As a coda to the article, the last section offers an experiment of literary ecocriticism in combination with an intermedial approach and Artificial Intelligence.