URBAN SPACE AND ECOLOGICAL ALIENATION IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S FICTION: AN ECOCRITICAL AND SPATIAL APPROACH

This article investigates the relationship between urban space and ecological alienation in selected novels by Margaret Atwood, focusing on Cat’s Eye (1988), Surfacing (1972), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year of the Flood (2009). While Atwood’s fiction has been extensively examined in relation to feminism, dystopian literature, and environmental ethics, the relationship between spatial organisation and ecological alienation provides an additional perspective for understanding her literary representation of modern civilisation. Drawing on ecocriticism and Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, this study explores how suburban landscapes, corporate compounds, urban inequalities, and transformed natural environments reflect changing human relationships with the nonhuman world. Through qualitative close reading and comparative textual analysis, the article identifies four interconnected features of ecological alienation: the spatial separation of human life from nature, the commodification and technological manipulation of the environment, the unequal distribution of environmental risks, and the disruption of the boundaries between urban civilization and the nonhuman world. The analysis demonstrates that Atwood represents ecological alienation not merely as physical separation from nature but as a cultural and structural condition sustained by anthropocentrism, consumerism, and the prioritisation of economic and technological control. By comparing realistic suburban fiction with dystopian environmental narratives, the article argues that Atwood’s treatment of space exposes the ecological contradictions of modernity and emphasizes the interdependence of human societies and natural systems.