- ホーム
- > 洋書
- > 英文書
- > Literary Criticism
Full Description
The world keeps turning to apocalypticism. Time is imagined as proceeding ineluctably to a catastrophic, perhaps revelatory conclusion. Even when evacuated of distinctly religious content, a broadly ecclesial structure persists in conceptions of our precarious life and our collective journey to an inevitable fate—the extinction of the human species. It is commonly believed that we are propelled along this course by human turpitude, myopia, hubris or ignorance, and by the irreparable damage we have wrought to the world we inhabit. Yet, this apprehension is insidious. Such teleological convictions and crises-laden narratives lead us to undervalue contingent, hesitant and provisional forms of experience and knowledge.
The essays comprising this volume concern a range of writers' engagements with apocalyptic reasoning. Extending from a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Triumph of Life' to critiques of contemporary American novels, they examine the ways in which 'end times' reasoning can inhibit imaginative reflection, blunt political advocacy or - more positively - provide a repertoire for the critique of complacency. By gathering essays concerning a wide range of periods and literary dispositions, this volume makes an important contribution to thinking about apocalypticism in literature but also as a social and political discourse. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studia Neophilologica.
Contents
Introduction: The Ongoing End: On the limits of apocalyptic narrative 1. 'A Shape ... Crouching within the shadow of a tomb': Shelley's Qualified Apocalypse in 'The Triumph of Life' 2. Between Apocalypse and Extinction: Eschatology in Ezra Pound's Poetry 3. This is not the way the world ends: Richard Hughes's rejoinder to William Golding's Lord of the Flies 4. Outlandish Apocalyptics and Creaturely Life in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux' 5. Vanishing Points; or, the Timescapes of the Contemporary American Novel 6. 'It's Not Dark Yet, but It's Getting There': Listening for the End Times in the Contemporary American Novel 7. Ecological Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy 8. Citrus noir: Strange Fruit in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange
