Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

What reactions could be created by re-reading a twenty-first-century American dystopic novel through Dante’s perspective? It is superfluous to say how the impact Dante has had on Italian literature from the thirteenth century up to the present day has been remarkable and, in some ways, devastating? What were and still are the reactions in the panorama of American literature of the twenty-first century? In this essay, I analyze some of the aspects of Dante’s Inferno in one of the most acclaimed novels of the American writer Cormac McCarthy, The Road. The novel, apparently, should have nothing in common with the canticle of Dante’s poem, especially considering the chronological gap between the two works and also the main theme. The work of Dante was written in the thirteenth century and the McCarthy’s novel “only” in 2006; the pilgrim’s journey through the Hell is set in the Medieval age, instead the American dystopian novel in an unspecified time period, but undoubtedly an apocalyptic event that, even if not specified, likely would have been caused by a nuclear catastrophe. This short essay explores the possible influences and echoes of the Divine Comedy. This work opens a new field of research to build a bridge between the Southern Gothic American genre and Italian Medieval literature.