An Engagement with Life-Place Entanglements: An Ecocritical Reading of Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain

Abstract

Through an ecocritical perspective, my paper is a geocritical study of Anita Desai’s novel Fire on the Mountain (1977) by analyzing the literary text’s engagement with the natural landscape as its platial setting and the textual representation of nature. My paper analyzes the presencing and representation of the environment and to what effect (and affect) has the place of Carignano (the site at which the story unfolds) been modelled as a life-place for the novel’s characters, to critically study the delineation of interdependence between organisms (both human and nonhuman) and their environment. Thus, my paper seeks to emphasize the relationality between the characters and their environment to analyze how the spatial discourse effectively shapes the characters’ mindscapes and ecological visions respectively.</jats:p