Flight behaviour and the hungry tide on environmental crisis and the retelling of place

Abstract

The environmental crisis is not necessarily a new concern in literature. Pre-modern writings have responded to the crisis in a variety of ways, from the anthropomorphic deification of environmental phenomena to Romantic escapism. In the face of current environmental crisis, contemporary writings that are environmentally conscious are showing a reemergence of the uncertainty that comes with questioning place. One of the struggles with this is the limits of imagining story independent of place. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviorand Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide do not so much stretch those boundaries as assess them. They tell their stories on multiple levels: the relationships between environment and community, narrative voice and structure and reader expectations. This paper intends to assess how representation of environment and its associated ideas is changing the narrative order, the issue of class and entitlement, how the content of the story is affected by the inclusion of non-human entities in a human social construct; and the upset of the status quo with regard to how plot, character and setting relate to each other.