Abstract:
As the title, Re-centring Mother Earth: Ecological Reading of Contemporary Works of Fiction suggests, this book seeks to restore the principal influence of Mother Nature in human life. Individual literary critics have demonstrated how literary writers have deliberately presented the impact of Mother Nature on the lives of characters. However, most of them have hardly demonstrated the indispensable role of ecological environment on the political, social and religious attributes of human life. Although most scholars single out human greed and imperialism as the prime causes of historical events such as colonialism, war, slavery and industrialisation, this book extendsit by investigating the influence of Mother Nature in the political, cultural, religious aspects of human life in contemporary novels. This book is close textual analysis of works of fiction from any regions of the globe. The wide scope of choice of texts is deliberate because ecological issues are global and should be given the gravity they deserve in every continent. This study would have used academic and journalistic primary texts, but I choose literary texts because literature has the capacity to speak to hearts rather than minds of audiences. According to Brueggemann (1989): To address the issue of a truth greatly reduced requires us to be poets that speak against a prose world. The terms of that phrase are readily misunderstood. By prose I refer to a world that is organised in settled formulae, so that even pastoral prayers and love letters sound like memos (48) Brueggemann in the line “speak against prose world” suggests that works of art possess certain unconventionality that will invert the homocentric ethos that has constantly relegated Mother Nature.
