This chapter considers how two threads of Cold War–era environmental representation – the rise of ecological perspectives and the reinvigoration of Western wilderness tropes – existed in tension rather than conflict in American literary environmentalism of the period. It focuses specifically on how Cold War policy has had a lasting impact on environmental representation through two illustrative cases: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968). Carson wielded apocalyptic and containment rhetoric to generate widespread interest in liberal reform related to broad ecological concerns. In the process, she kicked off more radical environmental movements that took ecology as a basis for antiestablishment social and political alternatives, for whom Abbey became a figurehead. But in his own writing, Abbey wed ecological perspectives to tropes of rugged frontier masculinity, emphasizing standby Cold War values concerning individualist freedom even as he rejected state and corporate power. In short, radical environmentalism often functioned in part as a normative intervention into Cold War consensus, even as it was disintegrating amid efforts by writers like Abbey to repudiate it.

This chapter studies the works of Jules Verne, primarily his forgotten work The Purchase of the North Pole (1889). Providing ideational background, it compares Charles Fourier’s fantasy of the anthropogenic correction of the Earth’s axis in Theory of the Four Movements (1808) with Eugène Huzar’s secularisation of the apocalypse as the result of technoscientific intervention in The End of the World Through Science (1855). Delving into The Purchase of the North Pole, the chapter analyses how Verne exposes the Promethean ambitions of the Baltimore Gun Club by acutely describing the imminent natural disasters following their attempt to correct the axis and climate of the Earth. It concludes that Verne represented climate intervention as a potentially catastrophic practice, rendering the planetary consequences of anthropogenic climate change intelligible through an apocalyptic rhetoric.

Eschatology is the study of the Last Days, including the idea that at the Last Judgement, God will judge each human being who has ever lived. Starting with the biblical origins of eschatological thought, I explore several new developments in discourses from the Byzantine Christian tradition, focusing on theological and liturgical responses to concerns about the end of time and the salvation of believers. The doctrines of divinisation, universal salvation, millennialism and purgatory were developed in different ways in East and West. I contrast these theological responses with the popular eschatological visions found in apocalypses and saints’ Lives.

In this chapter, Nicole Seymour and Zia Salim observe that two paradigms dominate the cultural imagination of Los Angeles’s environmental conditions. One is a suspicion that the city’s “nature” is troublingly artificial – a water-hungry metropolis imposed on what is often erroneously described as a desert. The other is a notion of LA as environmentally extreme, disastrous, and even apocalyptic, not only in its wildfires but also in tectonic activity, drought, and flood. These paradigms often overlap, human action reaping a harvest of natural disaster. Through a capacious literary archive that stretches chronologically from Don Ryan’s Angel’s Flight (1927) to Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (2021), however, Seymour and Salim find that LA literature does not always propagate these twin paradigms uncritically; rather, they are often challenged and complexified.

This chapter examines actual but in particular imagined deserts of the Anthropocene as they have been portrayed in literature, while also making occasional forays into other cultural media like film, television, comics, and computer games. The chapter is divided into three sections titled Apocalyptic Desert, Toxic Desert, and Biospheric Desert, each section examining how Eurocentric ideologies, religious perspectives, financial models, as well as literary and cultural traditions have tended to paint the desert in the light of an existential struggle of “the human.” The chapter argues that when reading deserts from the perspective of the Anthropocene, it is important to undo any totalizing vision of the desert. The chapter points towards a wide range of desert texts like Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, J.G. Ballard’s The Drought, David Brin’s The Postman, and Edan Lepucki’s California, computer games like Spec Ops: The Line, and Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, films like The Mad Max franchise, as well as comics like Judge Dredd and Tank Girl. The chapter concludes with an extended reading of Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife and Frank Herbert’s Dune.

This chapter implicitly responds to other chapters’ examination of imperial ideologies of time as well as their insistence on alternative temporalities. It does so by addressing the meanings and lived experiences of empire and its waves of apocalypse from the point of view of early Native literary studies and contemporary Native literary studies. In this chapter, literary categories open up history and demand that we see and think about periodization itself. Through a brief survey of early and contemporary texts, the chapter introduces readers to early (North American) Native studies and contemporary US Native literary studies, showing how both these overlapping bodies of literature helps us to see and better understand empire and ongoing imperial formations.

Chapter 1 argues that apocalyptic images and texts from the late Romantic period onwards respond to John Milton’s poetic treatment of temporality and grief in Paradise Lost, focusing on Mary Shelley’s apocalypse novel The Last Man. Shelley’s work, a project of revivification and memorialisation, challenges more conventional public narratives by embracing fragmentation and combining personal loss and universal catastrophe. In doing so, the novel draws on Milton’s epic, especially Adam’s prophetic vision after the fall. Shelley’s writings, including her letters, journals and Frankenstein, are read alongside John Martin’s apocalypse paintings and mezzotint illustrations of Paradise Lost. The chapter begins by positioning Shelley’s novel as a shared intertext for Martin’s The Last Man and Louis Édouard Fournier’s The Funeral of Shelley, both housed in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. It argues that Martin’s Paradise Lost illustrations more closely parallel Shelley’s literary response to Milton: both recreate Milton’s prophetic temporality and express apocalyptic grief through reference to darkness and light.

The Introduction offers the reader a way into the 1810s through Anna Letitia Barbauld’s bleak, prophetic satire, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812). A poem written amidst the tensions of war, famine, unemployment, food shortages, and economic decline, it also serves as a record of the peculiarity of this decade as one caught amidst a flurry of new ideas, beliefs, and concepts, but without a clear sense of how such newness might be understood, interpreted, or even accepted. The chapter reads Barbauld’s poem as a framing device to introduce the twelve chapters that comprise the volume and their shared concerns with sexuality and identity, religion and politics, race and gender, disability and the environment, aesthetics and philanthropy, communication and confusion, and social and interspecies relations.

George Lippard popularized a new form of novel whose thickly interlaced plotlines and generic layering conveyed social and moral dimensions of urban experience inaccessible to more conventional literary and journalistic modes of depicting cities. Dwelling on various forms of nefarious association tethering and tainting Philadelphia’s citizens, Lippard’s sensational novel, The Quaker City (1845), focuses on two social “shapes” urban participatory sin can take, structural complicity and network complicity. It devotes major plotlines, each featuring a distinct narrative form, to the investigation of each. Each kind of complicity imposes crucial aesthetic constraints on its own narrativization, and these constraints are overcome, the novel suggests, only when these two narrative forms are subsumed within a totalizing vision of Christian eschatology, or apocalypse.

At this point, the discussion turns to the calendar’s role in regulating the internal operations of the polity. The year was an essential administrative and legal unit. From the end of the fourth century, one can detect a persistent tendency to subordinate crucial operations to the calendar itself, which often had a shifting relationship to the solar cycle and the cycle of the seasons, and to construct cycles of years which were to operate with great regularity. The chapter examines in greatest detail the consular year, the census, and the saeculum or century. The same tension between ideal and practice can also be detected here. The third and early-second centuries represented the high point of this effort, although it would long remain an ideal.

Experimental writing challenges familiar ways of the representation of reality through a literary text. This chapter interrogates the notion of experimental writing and considers its place among African literary genres. The chapter then zooms in on experimental writing in African languages, with a case study of two contemporary Swahili writers, Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944–2020) and William Mkufya (1953–). Both writers have interrogated in their writing the nature of African postcolonial reality and considered possibilities of altering that reality, through reparation and reconstruction, but also through a full-fledged recasting and redefinition of the intellectual frameworks that support contemporary African life. Both authors use Swahili, but they load language and style with a multitude of new meanings. In effect, language becomes an abstract and flexible structure capable of thorough transformation to conceive of and express a radically new reality. The same applies to the adoption and adaptation of literary genres. Genres lose their typical literary and ideological determinations. The experimental writing of these authors challenges literary realism in African literature and creates a “novel genre” to articulate texts of a futurist and truly emancipatory African philosophy.

This chapter offers a utopian reading of the British science fiction subgenre of the cosy catastrophe. Coined by Brian Aldiss in 1973 as a pejorative term, the cosy catastrophe names a distinct group of English fictions written after World War II. Writers such as John Wyndham, John Christpher, Rose Macauley, J. G. Ballard, and Charles Eric Maine imagined apocalyptic disasters in which middle-class male protagonists ‘have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off’, as Aldiss put it. Whilst Aldiss dismissed such fictions as ‘devoid of ideas’, the chapter presents an alternative reading, arguing that cosy catastrophes offer powerful allegories of a distinctively English postwar sensibility. Within this curious narrative pleasure of a masochistic embrace of decline we can identify a paradoxical utopian longing for the dystopian smashing of systems. The chapter concludes that the cosy catastrophe is best understood as a cultural articulation of English declinism at the moment when decolonisation confronts postwar Britain.

This chapter traces and contingently periodizes the development of Latinx science fiction from the early 1990s to the present, and charts its historical, political, and cultural contexts. While noting the complex genealogies of the genre, the chapter begins with a survey of Latinx dystopian and post/apocalyptic works responding to the nightmarish aftermath of the passing of NAFTA. The chapter then shifts to examine how Latinx science fiction following 9/11 foregrounds how Latinxs have never been safe in our own ostensible homeland. The remainder of the chapter maps how the genre proliferates in an unprecedented manner following the turn of the millennium, diversifying in terms of ethno-racial identity, subgenres, tropes, and subject matter that demand hemispheric approaches. The diverse narratives comprising Latinx science fiction reengage the post/apocalyptic, cyberpunk, and dystopian/utopian to excavate and linger in the past so as to radically restructure both the present and future. This chapter explores how Latinx science fiction narratives – differential, dissensual, and generative – collectively envision brown temporalities and futures of being-in-common.

This chapter provides a survey of ecclesiastical and monastic organisations and how lay people engaged with them. There was no singular ‘Frankish Church’. There was considerable variation in what people wanted, how the liturgy was arranged, access to church councils and books, and how communities connected to Roman, English, Irish, Spanish, or Byzantine religious worlds. Communities were united by relatively compact beliefs, not least the need for imminent moral reform and penance ahead of an inevitable appearance at Judgement Day – whether it was at hand or far in the future.

This chapter traces the complex legacies of multiple religious traditions, including Christianity, Islam, and syncretistic spirituality, as they inform utopian strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American fiction, including the miraculous realism of Toni Morrison, the lyrical historicism of Marilynne Robinson, and the religiously themed science fiction of James Blish and G. Willow Wilson. Apocalyptic concepts, with a strong emphasis on transformative and liberatory possibility, are a recurrent element of these narratives.  The term “spirituality” itself is ambiguous, particularly in a national context in which religion has been a source of both oppression and hope. The chapter draws on postsecular critiques of literature and culture that, in John McClure’s terms, indicate “a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religion.” It argues that skeptical perspectives do not necessarily militate against the aesthetic and ethical potential of theologically oriented utopian fiction.

This chapter argues that contemporary openings to utopian thinking are confronted by an array of different temporal frameworks that afford radically different possibilities for human agency and cohere with radically different political and ethical demands. These include, on the one hand, the geologic time scale of the Anthropocene, the long historical time informing social activism and social justice movements (e.g., the perspectives afforded by the histories of slavery, genocide, and colonialism), and the utopian perspective of hope or what Ernst Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. These must confront, on the other hand, the cyclical time of economic growth and recession, the exigent time of electoral cycles, and the frozen time of “capitalist realism.” This chapter explores conceptual and fictional responses to this matrix of possibilities, especially in narratives by Cormac McCarthy, Donna Haraway, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson.