TY - JOUR AU - Segato, Giulio PY - 2022/09/20 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - ‘A Child of God Much Like Yourself Perhaps’. An Ecocritical Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God JF - Linguæ & - Journal of Modern Languages and Cultures JA - Linguæ& VL - 21 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - 10.14276/l.v21i1.3416 UR - https://journals.uniurb.it/index.php/linguae/article/view/3416 SP - 23 - 30 AB - <p>Cormac McCarthy’s fiction has been widely studied through the lens of Ecocriticism, probably because nature plays a prominent role in his novels in which the setting is often a decisive narrative element. The most relevant environmental analyses concern <em>The Trilogy Border</em> novels, <em>Blood Meridian</em> and, of course, <em>The Road</em>, a post-apocalyptic novel fundamentally centered on the environment issue.</p><p>The aim of this study is to investigate <em>Child of God</em>, the writer’s shortest novel, from an ecocritical point of view, despite the apparent absence of environmental characters in the book. <em>Child of God </em>could be actually seen as a McCarthy’s early concern with the twentieth-century industrial development’s impact on the environment: the early dissolution of the protagonist’s family farm, taken away by the State, for instance, coincides with the start of the human dissolution of the protagonist, a psychopath murderer. Here, McCarthy’s defiance of the environmentally reckless present is equated with the mental illness of the protagonist, Lester Ballard.&nbsp;</p><p>By investigating one of McCarthy's most significant early novels through an ecocritical approach, it will be possible to better understand the author's environmental turning point in his late novels as well</p> ER -