The recent oceanic turn in the humanities has brought to the foreground blue ecocriticism as a promising literary field and a sound critical framework capable of complementing ecocriticism, spurring reflections on alternative perspectives and deepening the knowledge on the relationship between humans and bodies of water. This book engages in a blue ecocritical analysis of The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019), two novels by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. After an introductory chapter concerning the origins and principles of green ecocriticism, the book presents paradigms and images of blue ecocriticism, by focusing on the representation of water in literature and the human behaviours towards this fluid element. Blue ecocritical principles are then applied to Amitav Ghosh’s novels, thus highlighting the varying meanings and dimensions of water in the Indian author’s recent prose.

Costanza Mondo (Orcid number 0000-0002-2236-4580) is a PhD student in Digital Humanities at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures at the University of Torino. Her research interests include blue ecocriticism and ecocriticism, African and Indian anglophone postcolonial literature and contemporary English literature. In her academic publications, the authors she has focused on are mainly Amitav Ghosh, Aravind Adiga, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro.