This paper traces a quiet but consequential loss in Victorian translation of the Old Norse sagas. Focusing on George Dasent’s translations of the Njal’s Saga and William Morris’ translation of the Volsunga Saga this paper attempts to show that while rendering arboreal and sylvan vocabulary from Old Norse into English prose, they relegated what were once sacred and agentive landscapes into mere backdrop. Drawing on ecocritical theory and semiotics (this paper argues that this shift from “encyclopaedic” to “lexical” meaning reflects a broader epistemological rupture: the modern severing of language from living relation. The translators’ lexical choices - their domestication of sacred trees, their rationalization of mythic space, and their dovetailing of foreign texts mirror the same industrial and imperial logic, that was used to appropriate and mould the perception of foreign and colonised lands.

This paper analyses The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh on the basis of ecocriticism. The Sundarbans as a complex ecosystem have been introduced in the novel and through which human lives and the natural world are in conflict. Ghosh, with the help of the characters of Piya, Kanai, Fokir and others, creates the conflict between conservation and human survival. The story redefines the anthropocentric view of the world and questions the voices that are important in environmental discussion. Ecocritical analysis shows how the text portrays the place of tide country as a borderland where there is a disintegration of boundaries between culture and nature. The novel questions the morality of wildlife conservation when it does not consider the requirements of disfavoured groups. Ghosh raises the issues of environmental justice through the scenario of Morichjhapi. The predicament between Piya and Fokir shows other forms of knowing and being in contact with the nature. Ghosh provides a complex ecocritical vision that does not allow easy dichotomies between human and nonhuman worlds. The novel eventually supports a conservation methodology that places the local communities and the knowledge systems of the indigenous people first.

This article examines the visual strategies employed in Seán Michael Wilson and Akiko Shimojima’s graphic novel The Minamata Story: An EcoTragedy (2021) to represent ecological grief and trauma arising due to the Minamata disease outbreak caused by methylmercury contamination. Primarily conceptualised around Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘ecology without nature’ and drawing on Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville Ellis’ notion of ‘ecological grief’, the article argues that the graphic depiction of the methylmercury poisoning generates a shared sense of loss and trauma across all ecological forms, hinting at its interconnected ecological perspective. Based on this, the article seeks to reconceptualise the understanding of ecological grief not merely as a human response to environmental loss but as a sense of distress and trauma permeating across the ecology. To study this shared network of grief among ecological forms, the article draws on David Biro’s concept of ‘mirror metaphor of pain’, and analyses how the visual rhetoric of the graphic novel functions as graphic mirror metaphors that reflect and validate one another’s ecological distress as a strategy to communicate the otherwise inexpressable grief. Engaging with Neil Cohn’s concepts of continuity constraint and suppletion, Thierry Groensteen’s notions of braiding and general arthrology, and Scott McCloud’s idea of closure, the article analyses how multimodal recurrence, visual parallelism, and the interplay of presence and absence of certain visual elements in the text counter the manufactured invisibility of ecological grief, challenging anthropocentric framings of ecological suffering. Ultimately, the article examines how Wilson and Shimojima’s graphic novel transforms panels into active sites of meaning-making, generating a networked visual logic that articulates a shared understanding of what may be termed ‘ecology in grief’.

This paper examines Suchen Christine Lim’s (born July 15, 1948) The River Song (2013) through the framework of Green Cultural Studies. It focuses on the environmental change and subaltern identity in the Global South. The novel is set in Singapore, with the backdrop of the Clean River Campaign of the 1970s and 1980s. It reflects how state-led environmental reform can lead to environmental injustice and ecological displacement for the socially marginalized communities. The narrative foregrounds the experience of the socially vulnerable class. They are excluded from the dominant urban discourse when the Clean River Campaign starts to develop the urban areas. The study situates the novel within a broader debate about how environmentalism can lead to the marginalization of certain communities when it completely overlooks subaltern issues. The River’s Song not only counters the dominant culture but also resists the dominant state discourse of development, which is influenced by Western environmentalism and lacks integration of the issues of the Global South. The paper serves as a critique of environmentalism, which prioritizes non-human concerns over human ones. It emphasizes that environmental reform cannot be isolated from human concerns, including class, gender, and caste, and offers a critical perspective on the human cost of progress in the Global South. By incorporating marginalized human groups into environmental studies, the paper advocates for a balanced approach as suggested by Joan Hochman in Green Cultural Studies: An Introductory Critique of an Emerging Discipline and proposes the inclusion of subaltern groups in socio-political development and environmental reform.

The posthuman relationship between Oblivia Ethylene, a traumatised Aboriginal protagonist, and the Australian black swans in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book. Drawing on the theories of posthumanism, particularly the works of Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway, the study argues that the novel resists anthropocentric and colonial frameworks by portraying human–nonhuman connections as ontological rather than metaphorical. Oblivia’s subjectivity emerges not through conventional speech, political sovereignty, or assimilation, but through silence, shared movement, and multispecies companionship. The black swans are depicted as sentient agents with their own emotional, ceremonial, and ecological presence, disrupting the symbolic reduction of animals in literature. This kinship is interpreted within Indigenous ecological worldviews, where animals, land, and weather are integral members of “Country” (Rose 7) and are imbued with ancestral significance. The dystopian setting of a climate-ravaged Australia, marked by environmental degradation, political collapse, and the displacement of Aboriginal communities, serves as both a backdrop and a catalyst for Oblivia’s interspecies becoming. By situating Wright’s novel within Indigenous environmental thought and posthumanist discourse, the article reveals how The Swan Book imagines survival, resistance, and identity beyond the human, foregrounding the role of nonhuman agency in shaping future possibilities for coexistence.

Subaltern Perspectives in Indian Context: Critical Responses edited by Dipak Giri comprises 22 divergent chapters and an interview with Dalit writer Sharankumar Limbale on Dalit life, struggle and works interviewed by Dipak Giri. In the Introduction, the subaltern and its meaning, how the term is particularly pointed out of the marginalized group of people has been traced out. From the history of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Political activist and through the South Asian Feminist critics like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her masterpiece “Can the Subaltern Speak?” have been discussed in detail. The book explores and touches all kinds of marginalized groups like peasants, workers, and women.

Aidan Tynan's work ventures beyond traditional approaches to explore the multifaceted symbolism of deserts and wastelands in Western literature and philosophy. The book explores cross-disciplinary domains such as psychology, psychoanalysis, modern literature, myths and philosophy. It takes readers on an unconventional journey exploring deserts and wastelands. While the book is not strictly an ecocritical work, it shares similarities with ecocriticism that seeks to overcome biases in traditional approaches. Tynan challenges the trends in ecocriticism and the perception of deserts as mere physical landscapes, presenting them as rich metaphors for existential contemplation and enlightenment. He examines the desert's portrayal in Western literary and philosophical traditions, drawing parallels with the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and postmodern thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari. He explores how writers from various eras, including T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and William S. Burroughs, employ the desert motif to criticise the modern society. Tynan emphasises the transformative power of art in reimagining our planet and confronting existential and environmental crises. Tynan's narrative structure integrates themes of existentialism, ecology, aesthetics and cultural identity, inviting readers to explore the desert's rich symbolism from diverse viewpoints. Ultimately, the book offers a thought-provoking journey into the depths of human experience, challenging readers to reconsider their perceptions of deserts and wastelands.

At the end of Donald Trump’s presidentship, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) which was published almost 70 years back suddenly became one of the best-selling novels in the U.S. One could postulate that Trump’s various repressive racial policies, totalitarian mindset, shared cultural insecurity of the Americans and Orwell’s broad minacious dystopian vision were the reason behind this hasty popularity. This is the process, I think, by which a book becomes canon by rediscovering its significance in every new ‘turn’ of history. Dorothy M. Figueira’s Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity although was first published in 2002, the book is in similar fashion more relevant at present than ever before especially in the context of India. Why? I would provide an answer to this statement at the end of my discussion.

This book brings a continuous evolution and preservation of refugee community identities, transformation of cultural values and Politicization of linguistic nationalism in Assam and Tripura in postcolonial India. By using primary resources such as central and state government archives, official records, census data, extensive field survey, along with contemporary literature author aims to portray the resistance of refugees for collective community identity and official recognition as a citizen of India. Author tried to question the categorization of refugees' as a fragmented cultural and ethnic identities and present a biased and discriminatory politics of state towards Bengali refugees' in Assam and Tripura during refugee rehabilitation programme. She also highlighted interlinkage of refugee issue also with the identity politics, dispute on boundary demarcations, land resource management and allocation along with preservation of tribal ethnicity and collective community identity values.

The book for review is comprised of eight chapters. Each reverberates around the existence of the Rajbanshi community with their own history, socio-cultural behaviour, and moreover, folktales and folksongs – an oral literature associated with them. As the book is titled the “Rajbanshi Folk Tales and Folk Songs”, the focus is much on that subject matter only rather than on the history of the Rajbanshi community. But unless one gets acquainted with the history of the Rajbanshi community and its own separate socio-cultural identity, one cannot understand the essence of these folk tales and songs associated with this community. So, the author has wisely included a few chapters related to history, location, identity, and language of the Rajbanshi community at the end section of the book.