The present thesis is an attempt to read Anita Desai’s The Village by the Sea (1981) and Fasting, Feasting (1999) through the lens of Erin James’ econarratological approach. The current survey yokes together contextual and cognitive narratologies to reflect real-world cultural contexts of the selected novels and explore readers’ understanding of the emotional states and experiences of characters respectively. Besides, this mode of reading offers us an imaginative transportation which undertakes to help readers understand the environment from the perspective of others. Readers stand to experience these environmental imaginations via the “immersive” and “world-creating” powers of Desai’s selected novels. Hence, we analyze the storyworlds of the selected novels and highlight key textual cues within both texts that encourage readers to model and inhabit locally informed environmental experiences. Moreover, this enquiry takes into consideration the technique of “focalization” to present Desai’s version of India and questions the environmental and postcolonial implications encoded within the selected novels, and therefore places her country and its culture within an international consciousness and presents “alternative environmental imaginations” of India based upon an emerging national identity.
