Nonhuman agency in the Anthropocene: a comparative ecocritical analysis of Amitav Ghosh’s 'Gun Island' and Emilio Salgari’s 'I Misteri della Jungla Nera'

Abstract

The last few centuries have come to be known as the Anthropocene epoch on account of climate change. Innumerable geologists and Earth system scientists have managed to assess the scope, history, and future of global warming. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, scholars of the humanities have engaged with the social, political, and cultural repercussions of the Anthropocene. This thesis intends to examine the role of literature in the depiction of the present planetary crisis. In the first chapter, an overview of the implications of the Anthropocene on the concepts of time and scale and on the relationship between humans and nonhumans will be provided, mostly through two non-fiction works by Amitav Ghosh, "The Great Derangement" (2016) and "The Nutmeg’s Curse" (2021). The second chapter will be devoted to a close textual analysis of Ghosh’s 2019 novel "Gun Island" aimed at investigating the potentialities of the realist novel in depicting the uncanniness of anthropogenic climate change. Here, the temporalities and spatialities of the novel – especially the Sundarbans and Venice – will be scrutinised alongside the agency of both human and nonhumans. An analysis of the role of affect and of the improbable in the ecological awakening will then lead to a comparison between the realist novel and an alternative mode of representation employed by Ghosh in "Jungle Nama" (2021). In the third chapter, Emilio Salgari’s adventure novel "I Misteri della Jungla Nera" (1887-1895), also set in the Sundarbans, will be read in view of "Gun Island" in order to shed light on Ghosh’s ecological and Salgari’s exotic depiction of the same topography. In conclusion, it will emerge how different modes of representation either fail or manage to give voice to nonhuman agency.