Man and the Water Life: an Eco Critical Reading of Sarah Joseph’s Novel Gift in Green

Abstract

Nature and literature are closely connected. Regardless of the titles they go by, most works dealing with ecological issues share a common motive, namely, to make people change their conventional attitude towards the environment, or else to face the various types of global catastrophe. Ecocriticism is an essential area of literary and cultural analysis, and it also examines the closerelationship between literature and thenature from a variety of angles. The main aim of an eco critique is to understand the coherence and utility of texts from an ecological perspective and thereby put a proposalwith the solution on regarding with the different reaction that arose from the variety of environmentalproblems faced by the society. Ecocritical analysis of text begins from the study of the relationship between human and nature, and how different type environmental problems represented in the text effect the imbalances in the human culture; it also depicted variousattitudes of man towards nature. These are common ways of interpreting and analysing anecocritical work.Eco critics use a texts not only to analyze the essence of nature in literature, but also to analyse philosophy and behaviour of the society in relation to nature. They also criticise the different ways throughwhich a cultural position discredits and weakensnature.Eco critics have a more comprehensive, in-depth, and concise description of how and why environmental discourse communicates than the authors themselves, because the writers are engrossed in their own exclusive stories, though allthese writings bring together the ideas of the texts and authors, andput them in a new perspective of environmental awareness. The aim of this paper is to investigate several environmental problemswhich are depicted in Sarah Joseph's novel Gift in Green (2011), which has been translated byValsonThampu.It also looks upon how environmental problems are blended in this novel through a reading of it in an eco critical perspective. The paper also endeavours to understand the extended role of such literature in spreading environmental awareness in the present generation.