Ecological Grief and Intergenerational Memory in Contemporary English Literature

Dr.Akanksha Singh

Assistant Professor

Swami Vivekanand Subharti University

Meerut,Uttar Pradesh, 250001

Orcid id- https://orcid.org/0009-0008-0732-9905

Abstract— Contemporary English literature increasingly represents environmental loss not merely as ecological damage but as an affective and mnemonic crisis transmitted across generations. This study examines how ecological grief becomes embedded within intergenerational memory in recent Anglophone fiction and literary narratives concerned with climate disruption, species decline, damaged landscapes, displacement, and inherited environmental histories.
A central research gap lies in the limited integration of literary ecocriticism with computational approaches capable of tracing relationships between environmental emotion, temporal memory, kinship, and narrative perspective at scale. To address this gap, the study proposes a hybrid interpretive-computational framework combining close reading, transformer-based semantic analysis, emotion classification, temporal-reference extraction, and narrative-network modelling.
The research conceptualizes ecological grief as a multidimensional literary phenomenon involving mourning, anticipatory loss, ecological nostalgia, inherited trauma, place attachment, and disrupted environmental continuity. Particular attention is given to the ways memories narrated by parents, grandparents, descendants, and communal voices transform environmental change into a form of intergenerational cultural knowledge.
Keywords— Ecological grief, Intergenerational memory, Contemporary English literature, Ecocriticism, Computational literary studies, Natural language processing

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