Haunted Tropics: An Eco-Gothic Study of Roma Tearne’s Mosquito
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Abstract
This study seeks to critically study Sri Lankan English writer Roma Tearne’s novel Mosquito (2007) as Eco-gothic texts that use gothicised landscape tropes of the sea, the forest, the beach to highlight the intersections between human exploitation and environmental degradation in post-colonial Sri Lanka. By drawing on the theories of the Eco-gothic and associated concepts such as ecophobia, this study endeavours to examine how the Eco-gothic is manifested in this novel through a close connection between nature and the (dark) history of a place immersed in violence and war. The paper argues that the novel portrays how the civil war turned nature into a location of monstrosity. Tearne in her novel overturns popular conceptions of tropical islands as idyllic and shows these landscapes as sites of fear and the uncanny, and as palimpsests of multiple histories of political and ecological violence. It highlights how the use to which certain landscapes are put in post-colonial Sri Lanka renders these spaces fearful and uncanny, generating ecophobia.
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