TEXT, NATURE AND REPRESENTATION: AN ECOCRITICAL READING OF SELECTED CARIBBEAN NOVELS

TEXT, NATURE AND REPRESENTATION: AN ECOCRITICAL READING OF SELECTED CARIBBEAN NOVELS

Abstract:

This thesis titled “Text, Nature and Representation: An Ecocritical Reading of Selected Caribbean Novels,” examines the depiction of nature in relation to culture in Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando (1965), Herbert G. De Lisser’s Jane’s Career (1972), Earl Lovelace’ The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979) and Rene Maran’s Batouala (1922). The thesis deploys the insights and poetics of Ecocriticism to the evaluation of the selected novels to demonstrate their signification of the interactivity of nature and culture in their interdependence and mutual constitutiveness in Caribbean ecosystem. The involvement of man in the exploitation of nature and the effect it has on the social texture of the society is also part of the focus of the study. The study is located in the second wave of the literary development of the field. The broadening of the purview of the first wave to bring man into the scheme and locating vestiges of nature in urban areas, consequent upon the re-theorizing of nature accounts for the emergence of second wave of Ecocriticism. It thus makes for the possibility of analyzing works not necessarily interested in nature since the selected texts had been written before Ecocritics proposed the various strands of the theory used to examine nature-oriented works. In a careful survey of Caribbean literary works that have been subjected to Ecocritical interpretation, the selected texts are found not to have been given Ecocritical attention as done here. That is the gap that this study attempts to fill. The authors attempt to open up a community of people connected to the natural world in their socio-cultural life. The texts reveal that man is solely and indiscriminately involved in causing ecological violence or disequilibrium to the landscape which in turn, endangers human and non-human life. They argue that there is a confluence of environment and identity formation in the understanding of Caribbean literature. As such, the texts express a common ideological position of raising ecological consciousness. This is because environment is as much social, cultural and ideological an entity as it is a physical one

TEXT, NATURE AND REPRESENTATION: AN ECOCRITICAL READING OF SELECTED CARIBBEAN NOVELS