Exploring the ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands in literary texts: a comparative ecocritical study

Literary texts, often products of social structures, influence the way people live and shape society. They affect the way we view and interact with living beings as well as non-living elements. Texts possess great potential to fashion people's geographical imagination. Wetlands such as swamps,...

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Main Authors: Pradhan, Swapnit, Kumar, Nagendra
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2024
Online Access:http://journalarticle.ukm.my/24407/
http://journalarticle.ukm.my/24407/1/TE%202.pdf
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author Pradhan, Swapnit
Kumar, Nagendra
author_facet Pradhan, Swapnit
Kumar, Nagendra
author_sort Pradhan, Swapnit
building UKM Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description Literary texts, often products of social structures, influence the way people live and shape society. They affect the way we view and interact with living beings as well as non-living elements. Texts possess great potential to fashion people's geographical imagination. Wetlands such as swamps, marshes, and mangrove forests, for example, have varied significances in different temporal and spatial spectrums, but critical scholarship around ethics and representation of wetlands is largely unexplored. This paper, therefore, will primarily seek to analyse textual representations of wetlands in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1890), H. D. Thoreau’s Walking (1997), Aldo Leopold’s Marshland Elegy (2001), Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), and Sarah Joseph’s Gift in Green (2011). By comparing and contrasting these depictions by writers from the Global North and Global South across centuries, we seek to demarcate a clear line of distinction as well as overlaps in the behaviour and feelings of human beings towards the wetlands. The paper emphasises ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands through the lenses of ecocritical and bioregional theories of Rob Nixon, Simon Estok, and Tom Lynch. Therefore, socio-political analysis and cultural significance conveyed by these depictions may present insights concerning resentment, adoration, aestheticism, commodification, survival, divinity, and fear.
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spelling oai:generic.eprints.org:244072024-10-21T07:42:04Z http://journalarticle.ukm.my/24407/ Exploring the ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands in literary texts: a comparative ecocritical study Pradhan, Swapnit Kumar, Nagendra Literary texts, often products of social structures, influence the way people live and shape society. They affect the way we view and interact with living beings as well as non-living elements. Texts possess great potential to fashion people's geographical imagination. Wetlands such as swamps, marshes, and mangrove forests, for example, have varied significances in different temporal and spatial spectrums, but critical scholarship around ethics and representation of wetlands is largely unexplored. This paper, therefore, will primarily seek to analyse textual representations of wetlands in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1890), H. D. Thoreau’s Walking (1997), Aldo Leopold’s Marshland Elegy (2001), Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), and Sarah Joseph’s Gift in Green (2011). By comparing and contrasting these depictions by writers from the Global North and Global South across centuries, we seek to demarcate a clear line of distinction as well as overlaps in the behaviour and feelings of human beings towards the wetlands. The paper emphasises ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands through the lenses of ecocritical and bioregional theories of Rob Nixon, Simon Estok, and Tom Lynch. Therefore, socio-political analysis and cultural significance conveyed by these depictions may present insights concerning resentment, adoration, aestheticism, commodification, survival, divinity, and fear. Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2024-06 Article PeerReviewed application/pdf en http://journalarticle.ukm.my/24407/1/TE%202.pdf Pradhan, Swapnit and Kumar, Nagendra (2024) Exploring the ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands in literary texts: a comparative ecocritical study. 3L; Language,Linguistics and Literature,The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies., 30 (2). pp. 21-34. ISSN 0128-5157 https://ejournal.ukm.my/3l/issue/view/1720
spellingShingle Pradhan, Swapnit
Kumar, Nagendra
Exploring the ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands in literary texts: a comparative ecocritical study
title Exploring the ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands in literary texts: a comparative ecocritical study
title_full Exploring the ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands in literary texts: a comparative ecocritical study
title_fullStr Exploring the ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands in literary texts: a comparative ecocritical study
title_full_unstemmed Exploring the ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands in literary texts: a comparative ecocritical study
title_short Exploring the ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands in literary texts: a comparative ecocritical study
title_sort exploring the ethical and aesthetic representations of wetlands in literary texts: a comparative ecocritical study
url http://journalarticle.ukm.my/24407/
http://journalarticle.ukm.my/24407/
http://journalarticle.ukm.my/24407/1/TE%202.pdf