Environmental Themes in Ecofiction: In the Center of the Nation and Animal Dreams

Abstract

Environmental issues have been a recurrent theme in works of fiction since Earth Day 1970. With the accelerated greening of North American culture in the 1990s, there is renewed interest in ecofiction. This study interprets the human/nature relationships in two recently published novels: Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver and In the Center of the Nation by Dan O 'Brien. In both works a culture-threatening environmental issue constitutes a significant subtext of the narrative. Moreover, in both novels, attachments to place and land are crucial vectors in the resolution of the environmental conflicts: the ties of Native American and Hispanic villagers to their place in Arizona's desert Southwest in Animal Dreams, and the rootedness of ranchers in the short grass prairie of South Dakota in In the Center of the Nation. The personal and cultural ecologies presented in the narratives of these two novels are compared. Interpretations are made of the environmental conflict within the structure of each narrative....