Dystopic images of “No Man’s Land”: wilderness, literature, and theatre in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Mandel’s Station Eleven

Abstract

The purpose of the present research is to explore, in the branch of dystopian literature and in its apocalyptic scenarios, the relationship between the setting of “no man´s land” and the significance of art heritage (notably, literature and theatre) in order to understand the way how the environment and human behavior are interconnected in these particular cases. To carry out our study, two major postmodern dystopian novels written in the English language will be considered referential and therefore analyzed through the lens of ecocriticism: the postwar American novel Fahrenheit 451, published by Ray Bradbury in 1953, and the contemporary one Station Eleven, published by the Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel in 2014. It must be stated here that, after the recent covid-19 pandemic, Station Eleven could well be reinterpreted, so some notes on it will be made in this study.