Theorising the Postcolonial Eco-Novel: Unsettlement and the Nonhuman in Australian Ecofiction

This book explores how contemporary Australian ecofiction interrogates and challenges settler-colonial conceptions of nature and the nonhuman through a close-reading of nine Australian eco-novels. Fetherston's reading reveals the representation of the nonhuman in different contexts and the ability of fiction to destabilise settler claims on Australian land and the nonhuman. Texts covered include a combination of texts by First Nations authors, non-Indigenous Anglo-Celtic Australian authors writing within a settler-colonial literary tradition, and non-Indigenous Australian authors whose novels reflect diasporic literary practices. Fetherston argues that Australian ecofiction authors have established over the last decade a postcolonising eco-literary framework that connects the concepts of nonhuman agency and more-than human relationality with the notion of unsettlement, or unsettled belonging, in the context of the climate crisis.