OIL IN NIGERIAN PROSE FICTION: A STUDY OF HELON HABILA’S OIL ON WATER AND KAINE AGARY’S YELLOW YELLOW

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

Since prehistory, literature and the arts have been drawn to portrayals of physical environments and human-environment interactions. The modern environmentalist movement as it emerged first in the late nineteenth century and, in its more recent incarnation, in the 1960s, gave rise to a rich array of fictional and nonfictional writings concerned with humans' changing relationship to the natural world. Only since the early 1990s, however, has the long-standing interest of literary studies in these matters generated the initiative most commonly known as "ecocriticism," an eclectic and loosely coordinated movement whose contributions thus far have been most visible within its home discipline of literature but whose interests and alliances extend across various art forms and media. In such areas as the study of narrative and image, ecocriticism converges with its sister disciplines in the humanities: environmental anthropology, environmental history, and environmental philosophy.

Literature and environment studies-commonly called "ecocriticism" or "environmental criticism" in analogy to the more general term literary criticism-comprise an eclectic, pluriform, and cross-disciplinary initiative that aims to explore the environmental dimensions of literature and other creative media in a spirit of environmental concern not limited to any one method or commitment. As Lawrence Buell et al. explain, "Ecocriticism begins from the conviction that the arts of imagination and the study there of-by virtue of their grasp of the power of word, story, and image to reinforce, enliven, and direct environmental concern-can contribute significantly to the understanding of environmental problems: the multiple forms of eco-degradation that afflict planet earth today" (3). In this, ecocriticism concurs with other branches of the environmental humanities-ethics, history, religious studies, anthropology, humanistic geography-in holding that environmental phenomena must be comprehended, and that today's burgeoning array of environmental concerns must be addressed qualitatively as well as quantitatively.