Post-apocalypse now: Landscape and environmental values in the road and the walking dead

Abstract

May landscape description be considered an eco-critical metaphor? This paper proposes a text analysis of two post-apocalyptic narratives, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, as novel and movie, and the zombie drama The Walking Dead, as graphic novel and television series. Neither narrative provides an explanation for its apocalypse, or a direct warning as regards human environmental misbehaviour. But both the barren landscape described in the former work, and the renaturalizing one presented in the latter second may convey an environmental meaning, albeit in a different way. To evaluate the way in which contemporary audiences negotiate this, further research would be necessary. © Elena dell'Agnese.