From accounts of the Holocaust, to representations of AIDS, to predictions of environmental disaster; from Hal Lindsey's fundamentalist 1970s bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, to Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, the sense of apocalypse is very much with us. In Postmodern Apocalypse, Richard Dellamora and his contributors examine apocalypse in works by late twentieth-century writers, filmmakers, and critics.

Christians live in two overlapping ages: this present age and the age to come. By examining Revelation and other apocalyptic literature from the Gospels and the Old Testament, it can be argued that end-time events and the age to come have already begun. This understanding, however, can present many challenges. How do we explain this blending of present and future? How do the future resurrection of the body and the return of Christ impact pastoral care and sermon preparation now? C. Marvin Pate provides an accessible guide to the distinctive content, form, and function of apocalyptic literature. Key principles of interpretation specific to this genre are presented, as well as steps in communicating the theological messages of apocalyptic passages in the Bible. Pate's in-depth explanations offer a reliable introduction to this field of literature as well as new insights into the texts.

This book confronts the question of why our culture is so fascinated by the apocalypse. It ultimately argues that while many see the post-apocalyptic genre as reflective of contemporary fears, it has actually co-evolved with the transformations in our mediascape to become a perfect vehicle for transmedia storytelling. The post-apocalyptic offers audiences a portal to a fantasy world that is at once strange and familiar, offers a high degree of internal consistency and completeness, and allows for a diversity of stories by different creative teams in the same story world. With case studies of franchises such as The Walking Dead and The Terminator, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse offers analyses of how shifts in media industries and reception cultures have promoted a new kind of open, world-building narrative across film, television, video games, and print. For transmedia scholars and fans of the genre, this book shows how the end of the world is really just the beginning...

Told through the eyes of a young boy, By the Scruff of the Neck begins its tale in post-Second World War Holland of the 1940s and goes on to give a candid and often humorous account of a Catholic childhood and the dynamics of family life. In contrast, the impact of the German occupation of Holland provides an insight into the privations of the time, as well as the subsequent decision by the family to emigrate to Australia in 1952. The comparisons between life in Holland and in Australia are at times harsh, yet the continuing thread of courage and optimism lightens the otherwise difficult migrant experience. This is a book many will easily relate to, whether they are past or current migrants, or whether they are members of long-standing Australian families. Human foibles are common to most, and here, there is no holding back in dealing with the issues of growing up…and of coming to terms with being a ‘New Australian’.

Anti-Apocalypse was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. As the year 2000 looms, heralding a new millennium, apocalyptic thought abounds-and not merely among religious radicals. In politics, science, philosophy, popular culture, and feminist discourse, apprehensions of the End appear in images of cultural decline and urban chaos, forecasts of the end of history and ecological devastation, and visions of a new age of triumphant technology or a gender-free utopia. There is, Lee Quinby contends, a threatening "regime of truth" prevailing in the United States-and this regime, with its enforcement of absolute truth and morality, imperils democracy. In Anti-Apocalypse, Quinby offers a powerful critique of the millenarian rhetoric that pervades American culture. In doing so, she develops strategies for resisting its tyrannies. Drawing on feminist and Foucauldian theory, Quinby explores the complex relationship between power, truth, ethics, and apocalypse. She exposes the ramifications of this relationship in areas as diverse as jeanswear magazine advertising, the Human Genome project, contemporary feminism and philosophy, texts by Henry Adams and Zora Neale Hurston, and radical democratic activism. By bringing together such a wide range of topics, Quinby shows how apocalypse weaves its way through a vast network of seemingly unrelated discourses and practices. Tracing the deployment of power through systems of alliance, sexuality, and technology, Quinby reveals how these power relationships produce conflicting modes of subjectivity that create possibilities for resistance. She promotes a variety of critical stances—genealogical feminism, an ethics of the flesh, and "pissed criticism"—as challenges to apocalyptic claims for absolute truth and universal morality. Far-reaching in its implications for social and cultural theory as well as for political activism, Anti-Apocalypse will engage readers across the cultural spectrum and challenge them to confront one of the most subtle and insidious orthodoxies of our day. Lee Quinby is associate professor of English and American studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the author of Freedom, Foucault, and the Subject of America (1991) and coeditor (with Irene Diamond) of Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance (1988).

It charts the limits of representation within the royal theater where Whig playwrights were challenging Stuart mythography, before moving out onto the streets where the contracts of representation were less circumscribed by royal interests. It was on the streets of London that the Whig party staged massive civic performances - the Pope-Burning pageants - that allowed the circulation of the Exclusion platform."--BOOK JACKET.

Winner of the American Sociological Association's 'Distinguished Book Award' in the Religion category. For most of us, "Apocalypse" suggests the cataclysmic end of the world. Yet in Greek "apocalypse" means "revelation," and the real subject of the Book of Revelation is how the sacred arises in history at a moment of crisis and destiny. With origins in ancient religions, the apocalyptic has been a transformative force from the time of the Crusades, through the Reformation, the French Revolution and modern communism, all the way to the present day "Islamic Jihad" and "War on Terror." In Apocalypse, John R. Hall explores the significance of apocalyptic movements and the role they have played in the rise of the West and "The Empire of Modernity." This brilliant cross-disciplinary study offers a novel basis for rethinking our social order and its ambivalent relations to sacred history. Apocalypse will attract general readers seeking new understandings of the world in challenging times. Scholars and students will find a compelling synthesis that draws them into conversation with others interested in religion, theology, culture, philosophy, and phenomenology, as well as sociology, social theory, western civilization, and world history.

Worlds of Common Prayer explores book-length poems based on the Anglican liturgical calendar written between 1827 and 1935. John Keble created a new type of English poetry when he wrote his poetic companion to the Book of Common Prayer, The Christian Year (1827), which went on to become the single bestselling book of poetry in the English century. Drawing off of recent scholarship on both secularization studies and nineteenth-century conceptions of time, Worlds of Common Prayer exposes the surprisingly radical potential of liturgical poetry. The detective novelist and poet Dorothy L. Sayers wrote of her desire to find a “brick” that could smash the order of clock time, and discovered one in the liturgy. For major authors as dissimilar as Christina Rossetti and T.S. Eliot, the Anglican liturgical calendar served as a means of dismantling industrial capitalism’s time clock, and thereby of destabilizing the secular world order as a whole.