«La Strada» inversa. Geografia eco-critica, paesaggio e discorso ambientalista nella letteratura distopica e post-apocalittica

«THE ROAD» in reverse. Eco-Critical Geography, Landscape and Environmental Discourse in Dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature. – In literary tradition, if utopia illustrates a place so perfect that it does not exist, dystopia is the depiction of a place, or of a time, so unpleasant that no one desires to see it. Even if Mary Shelley’s The last man on Earth (1826) is considered a forerunner, dystopia as a lit- erary strategy matured along the Twentieth century, establishing with H.G. Well’s novels, and later blooming with Aldous Huxley’s, George Orwell’s, and Ray Bradbury’s works of fiction. With the strategy of describing a threatening future, dystopian texts offer a glimpse of the worries of their present, providing a chance of exploring the anxieties of their times. So, the first novels were haunted by epidemics and over-urbanization, the books of the Fifties by autocratic governments, while in the Seventies neo-Malthusian limits of growth were the most relevant concern; and now, nuclear holocausts, climate change catastrophes and post-apocalyptic representations are getting more and more. Even if not always central to the plot, environmental worries are a constant of the genre. Indeed, post human landscapes descriptions, like the ones offered in Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed 2007 novel, The Road, can easily work as an ecocritical metaphor, negotiating new forms of environmental awareness.