Re-centring Mother Earth

Book excerpt: Literary critics have focused on the nexus between literature and the ecological environment. As a mirror of society, literature encapsulates the natural ecosystem to address environmental degradation as one of the major issues being confronted by communities the world over. Individual literary critics have demonstrated how literary writers have deliberately presented the impact of Mother Nature on the lives of characters. However, most critics have hardly demonstrated the essential role of the ecological environment on the political, social and religious attributes of human life.in Re-centring Mother Earth: Ecological Reading of Contemporary Works of Fiction, Andrew Nyongesa investigates the role of Mother Nature in the political, cultural, religious aspects of human life in contemporary novels. Using eco-criticism, the study challenges homocentric attributes of literature and shows how the ecological environment affects all facets of human life.