Ecofeminist Colourings in the Works of Chinua Achebe and Thomas Hardy (Published)

The current global environmental crises urged me to investigate the manner in which writers from different backgrounds represent man’s relationship with nature in their texts and how they tie it to feminist dynamics. More precisely, the work focuses on the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s trilogy Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God and the English writer Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. The research question that guides the work is: how do Chinua Achebe and Thomas Hardy represent the connection between environmental issues and gender considerations? The hypothesis is based on the premise that the two authors represent the environment and feminine realities with hints to the need for more protection. Second Wave Ecocriticism as outlined by Lawrence Buell and Ecofeminism according to Paul Sanders Quick constitute the theoretical framework while the Comparative Approach of Tötösy de Zepetnek that stresses on an international dimension is the methodology used to bring out the ecofeminist visions of the two writers in the above-mentioned texts.

Keywords: Comparative Analysis, Degradation, Ecocriticism, Ecofeminism, Environment, Fiction, Protection, Vision

Romantic Ecologism: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the False Eco-criticism Tributes (Published)

Colonial and postcolonial environmental criticisms of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (TFA) have attributed to the novel eco-critical consciousness of significance, apparently ignoring the concern for environmental sustainability that is the foundation of current arts and humanities endeavour into the environmental discourses. On the strength of representations of human and non-human nature in the novel, critics have adjudged the novel to be a quintessence of the ecocritical ideal. Against some of the conceptual underpinnings of foremost ecocriticism postulations, ecological consciousness attributed to TFA are contested in this present study as false and misleading. The utilitarian values of ecocriticism and the remediating goal of literature in environmental studies, which are absent in the primary text and many of its secondary readings, are recommended as the basis for attributing ecocritical consciousness to texts. Natural entities and practices in the novel are contested as contextualization devices, employed by the author, for situating characters and events in their organic, pre-colonial African setting, and are described in this paper as the lost ecological values of Africa that are decried by contemporary critics of the global impacts of the science and technological cultures on the environment. This study employs ecocriticism as its theoretical basis.  

Keywords: African literature, Chinua Achebe, Ecocriticism, Environment, Literature, postcolonial literature