Postcolonial Ecocritical Analysis of 2025 Nobel Prize Literature Nominee Amitav Ghosh in Two Novels
Abstract
The present study aims at exploring postcolonial ecocritical perspective of Amitav Ghosh’s novels, The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019), to investigate how ecological issues are embedded in postcolonial contexts. This paper explores the complex relationship between the natural, the cultural and the powerful in Ghosh’s narratives thru a postcolonial ecocritical lens. The Hungry Tide is about the existential dilemmas and changes in the Sundarbans delta, and the vulnerability of marginalized communities to environmental disaster. Gun Island takes the inquiry global, after ecological crises and human migration from the Sundarbans to Venice, interrogating the wider impacts of climate change and displacement. Ghosh’s work brings to light the urgent problem of ecological justice, forcing the reader to reexamine the relationship between humans and the environment. In this analysis, it is argued that the continuous degradation of the environment is caused mainly by industrialization and relentless economic pursuits, as depicted in Ghosh’s fiction. The paper argues that, taken together, postcolonial literature, read thru an ecocritical lens, can offer new ways of understanding and responding to global ecological issues.
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References
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