Abstract

Kim Scott is an extraordinary Australian writer. More and more Australians pay their attention to Kim Scott’s works, studying Kim Scott’s novels from the perspective of post-modernism. The author of this paper intends to study Kim Scott’s novel of That Deadman Dance and explores his ecological consciousness in it as his novel describes the relation of humans and nature, the white and the aborigines, and man and self. Ecology is an interdisciplinary subject that is concerning life and environment, human and nature, human and society as well as spirit and material. Eco-criticism extends ecology to explore and criticize ecological ideology reflected in literary works. This paper is based on the U.S. eco-scholar Cheryll Glotfelty’s theory of eco-criticism and employs the three divisions of ecology put forward by Professor Shuyuan Lu.

Through the analysis of the ecological points of the white and the aborigines, the interpretation of the white social ecology and the aboriginal social ecology and the description of the white’s and the aborigines’ spiritual world, the paper reveals how man and nature can co-exist in harmony, the advantages of the aboriginal social ecology and spiritual ecology to solve the crisis. The novel expresses the writer’s thoughts over ecological crisis and he thinks that respecting nature and keeping natural, social and spiritual harmony is the right way to get out of the crisis.

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