Narrating the Unthinkable: Ecocritical Perspectives on Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and The Great Derangement

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s work has become central to contemporary ecocritical discourse, pairing imaginative narrative with cultural diagnosis. This paper performs a comparative ecocritical reading of The Hungry Tide (2004) and The Great Derangement (2016). In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh stages the tensions of inhabiting a fragile tidal landscape through multiple voices and local ecologies; in The Great Derangement, he theorizes literature’s failure to render climate change and urges aesthetic reform. Together, these works chart a poetics of ecological responsibility one attentive to scale, historicity, and multiplicity. The paper engages narrative form, ethics, politics, and epistemology to show how Ghosh’s project challenges anthropocentrism and calls for more expansive narrative imagination.