After the Catastrophe. Contemporary postapocalyptic narratives
Since ancient times, narratives about the end of the world have given voice to the anxieties and crises of the societies that have produced them. The forms of the apocalypse are thematically and diachronically broad and diverse (Pharr, Clark and Firestone 2016; De Cristofaro 2020). Already at the dawn of the nineteenth century, in her The Last Man (1826), Mary Shelley, the brilliant inventor of this genre, reflected on the condition of the single survivor of a lethal virus. While, for obvious chronological reasons, the anguish for a wasted environment is still absent in Shelley, many twentieth-century narratives reflect on the annihilating potential of humans’ actions on ecosystems.