Posthuman Ecologies and Narrative Transformation: Rethinking Environmental Consciousness in Selected Contemporary Anglophone Eco-Fiction

This paper belongs to the field of Environmental Humanities and Posthumanist Ecocriticism. It provides a comparative analysis of three prominent eco-fictions—Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018), Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007), and Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation (2014)—to examine how contemporary Anglophone fiction reimagines ecological consciousness through experimental narrative forms. Drawing on posthumanism, new materialism, and critical environmental studies, the research argues that these novels mobilize narrative form as ecological method: The Overstory employs multispecies polyphony to render arboreal intelligence and deep time; The Stone Gods uses cyclical narrative to expose ideological repetitions underpinning planetary collapse; Annihilation adopts epistemic instability to confront the limits of human cognition before ecological alterity. Through comparative analysis across five axes—narrative form, non-human agency, temporal scale, affective register, and ecological ethics—the paper demonstrates that these texts function as imaginative laboratories expanding ecological consciousness beyond anthropocentric frameworks. However, the analysis remains grounded in Anglophone texts from the Global North, a limitation this paper addresses by placing Western eco-fiction in critical conversation with Indigenous and Global South epistemologies that predate and challenge posthumanist theory.