A Posthumanist Ecocritical Reading of Maggie Gee’s The Ice People and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods: Recontextualising the Ecological Centre

This study examines Jeanette Winterson’s and Maggie Gee’s attitudes towards the culture/nature dichotomy from a posthumanist ecocritical standpoint, discussing their approaches regarding the association of humans with culture and nature. The thesis focuses on the connectedness between nature and culture as opposed to their separation. It also sets the conversation into a more extensive ecotheoretical setting, which does not just study our ethical and environmental perspectives; instead, it suggests answers for how we reconstruct our anthropocentric and ecological views on nature, humans, and cyborgs. Drawing on posthumanism and contemporary ecocriticism, thus, this study contends that in these novels, The Ice People and The Stone Gods, humans are not portrayed as superior to nature but as part of cultures, nature, and technologies. These two works foreground the exploitative systems that degrade the environment and socially oppressed people who are the explication to ecologically devalued spaces and rebuild the thought of the centre by representing it as variable and replaceable with its margins.