Abstract
The Earlie King & The Kid in Yellow (2018), by Danny Denton, narrates the myth of Ireland’s destruction through fire and the digital collapse after the country faces years of uninterrupted rains caused by the environmental catastrophe left mainly by the pharmaceutical industry. The purpose of this article is to investigate how this work matches and challenges both the ecocritical and dystopian tradition produced in the English language of the hegemonic centers and the literary tradition of its own country. For that I use four didactic divisions: 1) brief summary of how the Anthropocene has been represented in English-language literature; 2) the contribution of dystopia to the representation of climate change in literature; 3) historical overview of Irish literature, and 4) contextualization of Denton’s work under analysis. In this last part, I conclude with the observation that the novel does not propose an alternative to solve the problems of the Anthropocene, but warns of the collapse that we are about to experience.
Keywords
post apocalypse; Ireland; Anthropocene; dystopia; ecocriticism