Narrating Entanglement Without Dehumanisation in Contemporary Eco‐Fiction

ABSTRACT This essay presents a comparative analysis of two contemporary works of eco‐fiction, Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018) and Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood (2023). Both novels use multiperspective narration in the service of entanglement narratives, forms of storytelling that emphasise the interconnection of human and nonhuman life. As both a narrative structure and a metaphysical framework, entanglement is often mobilised to counter anthropocentrism: an ethically promising project that becomes counterproductive when expressed as dehumanisation. I read The Overstory as a representative example, showing how its anti‐anthropocentrism manifests in a sentimental, deterministic narrative whose many protagonists lack psychological realism and agency. By contrast, Birnam Wood re‐humanises the multiplot eco‐novel through an unsparing exploration of individual agency and its consequences in an interconnected yet nondeterministic world. While literary realism's deep focus on character has been critiqued as ill‐suited to the project of reckoning with climate change, Catton shows how realist attention to the entanglements of decision‐making individuals can force confrontation with the everyday psychic reality of complicity in larger networks of causality: a crucial insight for a work of eco‐fiction to afford.