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Investigating the indigenously authored novels There There (2018) by Tommy Orange and Indian Horse (2012) by Richard Wagamese, this paper depicts the inherited dislocation of identity through the symbolic use of ghosts as mechanisms to access ancestral memory and portray cultural haunting.

Paper long abstract

Across cultures, ghosts have extensively figured as literary symbols, captivating readers with their often-romanticised suggestion of existence beyond death in the form of apparitions. Once traditional in native lore, the reappearance of ghosts in contemporary Indigenous literature is an effective and symbolic technique, supporting the ideology of imaginative recuperation. In postcolonial literary practice, ghosts became effective devices to explore and portray class, colour, and gender inequalities, bridging the past with the present, encouraging haunting to become a conduit through which to investigate changes in perspectives. Drawing on philosopher Derrida’s concept of ‘Hauntology’, revealing how postcolonial cultures reflect the genesis of oral storytelling to depict inherited dislocation of identity, this paper investigates indigenously authored novels There There (2018) by Tommy Orange, and Indian Horse (2012) by Richard Wagamese.

In these texts, content is torn from real-life experiences. As ghosts become mechanisms to access ancestral memory and depict cultural temporalities, both authors employ haunting as a means to revisit, reveal and recuperate from colonial atrocities. When viewed through the lens of ancestral trauma, Emily Dickinson’s notion that the ‘external ghost’ was less disturbing than any internal haunting becomes particularly applicable. Symbolic of a silent history, the manifestation of ghosts external and internal, serves to separate time, reality and history while representing a continuing loss of identity and cultural futurity.

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This study explores how reading can change representations of nature and the role of humans within it. Using a fragment from Alexandru N. Stermin’s Fallen from the Jungle (2022), we analyze students’ responses through ecolinguistic, philosophical, and sociological lenses.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyzes from an empirical ecocritical perspective how reading can influence an individual's (ethical) relationship with nature. Our interdisciplinary team combines insights from ecolinguistics, philosophy, and sociology, building a framework in which discourse analysis, eco-existential reflection, and sociological investigation intersect.

The idea we start from is that narratives with ecological themes are not just texts that describe certain environmental problems, but can generate transformations in the way readers understand their relationship with nature.

The study focuses on a fragment taken from Căzuți din junglă [Fallen from the Jungle, 2022], a Romanian best-seller, written by Alexandru N. Stermin. The fragment depicts a cultivated piece of land above which no birds fly, indirectly highlighting the negative effects of monocultures and genetically modified organisms on ecosystems.

Our research examines the impact of reading this fragment on two groups of students – from the humanities and from biology. The methodology includes conducting structured interviews in two phases (before and after reading the text excerpt), to investigate how reading can change representations of nature and the role of humans within it. In the analysis, we will focus on the respondents' discourse and try to highlight the rhetorical and narrative strategies with the greatest impact on ecological awareness, while the philosophical approach will correlate these transformations with the issues of identity, well-being, freedom, love, death, and ethical responsibility.

Through its interdisciplinary nature, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how reading a text influences the attitudes that readers develop in relation to nature.

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In this paper, the movie Kantara, the novel Aranyak, and Northeast India’s Bodo belief system portray the intricate relation between humans and nature while highlighting the dependency between the two. The depiction of these three elements propels never-ending emotions between nature & humans.

Paper long abstract

“Folklore includes beliefs that are passed on traditionally.”- W.R. Bascom

The marriage between nature and humans has always been an integral part of society since antiquity. Global media has portrayed the diverse relationship of nature and humans, from textual to visual, from books like Jim Corbett's "My India" to movies like Ottal (1999).

One such narrative that stormed the Indian box office is the movie Kantara (2023). The movie Kantara elevated the notions of preservation of nature and tapped into human bonding through the age-old rituals and mystic performance of Bhoota Kola. When it comes to literary contribution, in the novel Aranyak (1939) by Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay, an intricate image of the lifestyle is woven, showcasing how people in rural areas of Bihar, Purnia, and Bhagalpur have survived in extreme conditions. The conflict between nature’s very own essence and the world created by humans is at play here. Almost every character in the novel faces poverty, yet they know nothing other than the forests. In a similar way, the Bodo community of Northeast India provides a clear example of a group that has lived in close relationship with nature. Historically residing in forested areas, folk beliefs and superstitions are deeply woven into their ways of life.

This paper aims to investigate the organic vision of nature and mystic folklore by following the qualitative research methods and content analysis of the novel Aranyak, the movie Kantara, and the Bodo belief system.

Keywords: Fiction, Indigenous Folklore, Mysticism, Nature.

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William Faulkner’s novels reflect folk customs, humor, and beliefs he learned in Mississippi. Influences appear in As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and The Bear. This paper explores his use of folklore sources and Southern dialect in shaping modern narrative art.

Paper long abstract

William Faulkner is one of the greatest American novelists, whose interest in folk customs and beliefs is clear. Growing up in Oxford, Mississippi, he was a town boy but knew the countryside well. He learned country talk from hunting with his father, listening to political campaigns with his uncle, and hearing Civil War, Native American, and hunting stories from his Mammy Callie. These early experiences shaped the humor, imagery, and folklore in his works.

The southeastern frontier preserved traditions of humorous and absurd tales, while Black communities told ghost and animal stories. Though Faulkner never directly admitted such influence, traces appear in his fiction. In As I Lay Dying, Cash’s cement leg and Anse Bundren’s remarriage reflect folk humor and absurd logic. His creation of Yoknapatawpha County grew directly from his hometown.

In 1929, he bought an old home in Oxford and named it Rowan Oak, a tree believed in folklore to protect against witches and evil spirits. In The Sound and the Fury, plants such as jimson weed, narcissus, and honeysuckle reflect Southern and Black folk beliefs. Narcissus suggests renewal, love, and destruction, shaping both symbols and character names such as Narcissa Benbow in Sartoris and Sanctuary.Wildlife also carries symbolic meaning. In The Bear, Old Ben reflects Native American traditions, where the bear represents sacred identity. The story shows men confronting nature and mortality.

This project has two parts: first, to trace folklore sources in Faulkner’s fiction; second, to analyze his use of Southern humor and dialectal speech.

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Fantasy has long helped us perceive the world anew. In a time of Climate Emergency is the nature of Fantasy changing to reflect the challenges it presents? Can the blue-sky thinking of the Fantastic provide us with useful tools for addressing ‘the defining crisis of our time’ (UN)?

Paper long abstract

From Gilgamesh to Gawain and the Green Knight, the Brothers Grimm to

Grimdark, the natural world has provided the backdrop for Fantasy since

its earliest iterations. The playgrounds of childhood are often a writer’s

first Fantasy landscape and can develop into fully fledged storyworlds.

Do readers of Fantasy seek out the genre for a taste of this unsullied

environment? Is it nostalgia for the lost Edens of childhood, a way to

escape, or to find resilience and inspiration? And in a time of Climate

Emergency, is the nature of Fantasy changing to reflect the challenges it

presents? Can the blue-sky thinking of the Fantastic provide us with a

useful tool for addressing what the United Nations has called ‘the defining

crisis of our time’?

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This presentation discusses the inter-connections of African beliefs in the supernatural world and the physical world, and how these beliefs are presented in indigenous folktale narratives and novels. The discussion would be done against the backdrop of Western and Eastern African folktale cultures.

Paper long abstract

In some African cultures, it is believed that the physical world is controlled by the spirit world or by supernatural forces. Onongha (2023) posits that the major components of the African cosmos are essentially spiritual in nature.” (Onongha, 2023, p.1) This presentation takes a look at the inter-connections of the physical and spiritual world through depictions of folktales and fiction across selected African cultures. As such, the presentation would focus on cause and effects in the spirit and physical world as well as how curses and agreements function in the physical as well as the supernatural. This discussion would employ the creative works of writers from the East and West of Africa as practical examples of the inter-connections of African spirituality to the mundane existence of everyday people. The traditional folktale cultures of West African communities would also be highlighted by discussing how elements of the supernatural in folktales connects and influences not only creative writers but daily human life and existence. Some of the writers and their works that would be referred to are Jennifer. N. Makumbi’s Kintu, Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread, Cyprian Ekwensi’s An African Night Entertainment, among others.

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Mutated corporealities within toxic water environment in Jack Conner’s The Atomic Sea, narrating a radiation-altered world, are studied via embodied radiation aesthetics for envisioning transformed bodies as liminal ‘assemblages’ (ecological, technological, and organic) within irradiated interstice.

Paper long abstract

The literary imaginaries of mutated corporealities within toxic water environment can be decoded via the concept of ‘interstice’ (Yergeau 2018), describing in-between spaces, where identities, embodiments, and environments meet one another. The presentation addresses Jack Conner’s The Atomic Sea (2014), depicting a radiation-altered world with interspecies entanglement, where the protagonists’ physical and psychological adaptation to the irradiated water environment exemplifies the posthuman subject’s ‘relational, embodied and embedded, affective and accountable entity.’ (Braidotti 2018) The paper emphasizes that Conner’s irradiated environment creates forms, challenging the ‘collapse of distinctions between human and aquatic (benthic) life’ (Peters & Steinberg 2015) and making visible ‘the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory […] work of […] ‘crip technoscience’ (Hamraie & Fritsch 2019). This highlights how the mutated body becomes simultaneously a critique and a product of environmental crisis, where these transformed/mutated figures are not simply metaphors, but material realities, which dramatize bodies as liminal ‘assemblages’ (ecological, technological, and organic). Narrating mutated bodies’ refusal to return to any so-called normal state as the embodiment of ‘crip temporality’ (Chen et al. 2023), Conner’s novel outlines the productive disruption of fixed categorical boundaries, representing disabled, hybrid, and aquatic forms not as mere aberrations, but as dynamic sites of critical possibility. With the appeal to ‘embodied radiation aesthetics’ (Eswine 2018; Lütticken 2019), nuclear technoaesthetics (Masco 2004), ‘slow hope’ (Mauch 2018) and nuclear criticism (Salleh 2011; Mellin 2022), such envisioning the novel’s mutated/irradiated hybrid humans, genetically altered beings, contributes to debates about challenging human exceptionalism and destabilizing anthropocentric boundaries within toxic environments.

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Slovak writer E. J. Groch has introduced the concept of 'second naivety', in which human beings reduce their human selves in favour of spiritual and divine powers, most often represented by nature. In his work, he observes the process by which body diffuses and unifies with other natural creations.

Paper long abstract

In his work, Slovak writer Erik Jakub Groch (1957) presented the radical concept of 'Second Naivety' (2005), derived from religious practices of simplicity and minimalism as an alternative to the consumerism and materialism of the contemporary world. From the outset, the concept was closely associated with ecology as a moral quest and a display of compassion towards beings considered to be 'lower' than mankind. The concept has gradually undergone further development, and in Groch's later work Viety (2021), which translates as 'sentences brought by the wind', he begins to demonstrate self-observation of bodily diffusion and unification with other beings (trees, birds, insects, etc.). Through depoeticisation, he reaches the threshold between literature and mysticism. Reuniting with nature involves reduction and minimalism (in Groch's own words: 'It is essential to leave something out so that nature can describe itself'). Physically diminishing oneself allows one to transcend boundaries of body and move freely between the human narrator and other natural beings. Inner human emptiness is a prerequisite for acquiring new content from spiritual or natural realms. In the light of Latour's concept of agency, Groch challenges the human-centred, dominant perspective by pushing actants of nature to the most prominent position, which has a number of consequences, including showing a new order in which nature prevails in the world. The original paradox — analysing naivety is incompatible with being naive — is resolved in Groch's recent work by increasing emptiness (lack of syntax, sentences reduced to notes, etc.), allowing nature to describe itself.

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Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural (1952) bears striking similarities to Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur), specifically to the Grettis saga. Like Grettir the Strong, Roy Hobbs is a larger-than-life heroic figure—strong, brave, and ‘natural’, but also flawed, leading to his ultimate downfall.

Paper long abstract

Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural (1952) seems like a ‘natural’ subject for a conference that engages with ‘essentialist notions of the natural’. Although the novel itself is not a folk narrative strictly speaking, it very deliberately utilizes many elements of myth and legend. The path of the novel’s protagonist Roy Hobbs largely conforms to the archetypal patterns of folk heroes, as delineated by Otto Rank, Lord Raglan, Edward Tylor, Joseph Campbell, and others. Moreover—and perhaps more appropriate for the conference setting in Reykjavik—there are solid connections to the Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur), specifically to the Grettis saga.

Like Grettir the Strong, Roy Hobbs is a larger-than-life heroic figure—strong, brave, and ‘natural’, but with deep flaws that lead to his ultimate downfall. Further similarities between the two narratives are the inevitability of fate, in which both heroes seem trapped in tragic cycles of betrayal and failure, as well as a literary tone that seems deliberately understated, restrained, and stoic amid the highly dramatic confrontations of the story lines.

This paper will explore these connections, particularly to better understand the physical and spiritual ‘notions of the natural’ that emerge fully in both Malamud’s novel and the Grettis saga. The paper will also consider the 1984 film version of The Natural starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, which adheres closely to both the novel and saga until the end, when presumably Hollywood conventions must inevitably overcome the doom and gloom of traditional folk narrative.

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This paper examines how D.H. Lawrence entwines women and nature in Sons and Lovers, revealing gendered hierarchies where nature veils women as mere catalysts. Through an ecofeminist lens, it critiques the construction of the feminine and explores alternative readings of human–nonhuman relations.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how D.H. Lawrence intertwines women and nature in Sons and Lovers, examining the intersections of marginalization, ecofeminism, and gendered agency. Women in the novel often function as catalysts for the transformation of male protagonists, while nature mystifies and mediates their autonomy. For instance, Mrs. Morel undergoes mystical, transformative experiences: herself “melts out like scent into the shiny, pale air” in the garden (p.34), and she offers her infant son to the sun in a ritualistic gesture (p.51). These scenes reveal how Lawrence entwines women’s desires and emotions with natural imagery, yet uses nature to obscure their struggles and ambitions, positioning them primarily to serve the male narrative.

Miriam’s portrayal reflects a similar dynamic. As a solitary, almost divine figure, her intimacy with flowers and the natural world signifies spiritual autonomy, yet it remains largely unacknowledged or rejected by Paul. Throughout the novel, Lawrence stages a process of elimination: removing rivals such as Mr. Morel, Lily, and Miriam, to ensure women’s centrality revolves around male development. These examples demonstrate how gendered oppression and the exploitation of nature intersect, with women’s ties to the natural world deployed to advance male growth rather than affirm their own experiences or identities.

By interrogating these human–nonhuman entanglements, this study contributes to ecofeminist scholarship, offering alternative readings of women’s agency, relationality, and the ethical complexities of nature in literature. Ultimately, Sons and Lovers serve as a critical site to examine how male literary imagination constructs, constrains, and ritualizes female experience within ecological narratives.