Climate Change And The Child: Eco-anxiety, Industrial Legacy, And The Search For Refuge In Alys Conran’s Pigeon
Auteurs : Mohrem Boubaker . Belhamidi Hadjer .
Résumé
Alys Conran’s Pigeon transcends its social realist frame to offer a profound literary depiction of eco-anxiety, linking the psychological distress of its child protagonists to the degraded post-industrial Welsh landscape. This paper argues that the novel captures the core tenets of environmental psychology’s chronic fear of environmental doom, mapping it onto localised crises of industrial decay, cultural erosion, and social neglect. Through its bilingual narrative and focus on marginalised youth, Pigeon articulates a specific Welsh Anthropocene anxiety, where the trauma of a damaged habitat is inseparable from crises of language and identity. The novel, thus, emerges as a vital work of Welsh modernism, as it explores how environmental degradation permeates consciousness and shapes a desperate search for refuge and agency.
Mots clés
eco-anxiety- ; post-industrial ; Welsh modernism ; environmental psychology ; bilingualism
