Apocalypse, eco-awareness and pastoral as a triad of eco-phobia in selected works by Margaret Atwood

This research utilized ecocriticism to analyze Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). It illustrated how Atwood perceives environmental eco-phobia and its appropriation via apocalypse, pastoral, and eco-awareness. The statement of the research was a discussion of ecophobia as the fictional characters’ feelings of the impending apocalyptic danger threatening the natural environment, as well as the possible remedies to this problem. Therefore, eco-phobic apocalypse was analysed based on the selected characters’ experiences. The characters underwent eco-phobic feelings when they expected impending apocalyptic environmental disasters. As a result, they resorted to pastoral natural places where they developed eco-awareness, enabling them to control a detrimental catastrophe. In this regard, three ecocritical concepts were applied to the textual analysis of the selected works: apocalypse and pastoral by Greg Garrard and ecoawareness by Scott Slovic. The research achieved three objectives: 1) to examine natural apocalypse as a genuine indication of the characters’ feelings of eco-phobia in the selected novels by applying Garrard’s concept of an apocalypse, 2) to investigate how environmental pastoral scenic sublimes provide the characters with ideal regional components for their living in the selected novels by applying Garrard’s concept of pastoral, and 3) to discover the characters’ development of remedial eco-awareness which curbs their eco-phobic feelings depicted in the selected novels by applying Slovic’s concept of eco-awareness. As a conceptual framework for the entire study, ecocriticism was crucial to attaining these objectives. Textual analysis and close reading of characters, narrators, and settings were employed to attain these objectives. So, the significance of the research was to look into environmental eco-awareness as a way to stop the eco-phobic apocalypse. The research's major findings were that the rural and scenic sublimes were perfect parts of nature that helped protect the characters’ environment. Thus, the characters’ eco-awareness was a viable remedy for eco-phobic apocalypse through pastoral scenic sublimes.

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