Imprints of Climate Change in English Literature: Special Reference to Margaret Atwood’s Work

Abstract

The Eco-Criticism explores various constructions of the environment and environmental change mediated through virtual sites and thematic constructions in different popular venues, providing an account of how we imagine and reproduce ideas of the environment. We take popular communication here to include the entire “grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of everyday life” expressed in literature, media, film, social movements and other performances and speech acts.  Because of different geographies and socio-economic conditions, many post-colonial nations experience climate change differently from most advanced industrialized countries. The post-colonial lens of “power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony” tends to resolve an issue like climate change differently from an eco-critical approach. Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Year of the Flood’, the second in the trilogy, focuses on the civil unrest which would ensue — that human aspect of environmental degradation. States have collapsed and corporations are in charge. The very wealthy live in gated communities. Everyone else lives in slums, eating burgers made from mouse parts. Gangs are rife, as are religious cults, and it feels like ‘the end of the world’ is nigh.