Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel

by Teresa Heffernan

Overview

In Post-Apocalyptic Culture, Teresa Heffernan poses the question: what is at stake in a world that no longer believes in the power of the end? Although popular discourse increasingly understands apocalypse as synonymous with catastrophe, historically, in both its religious and secular usage, apocalypse was intricately linked to the emergence of a better world, to revelation, and to disclosure.

In this interdisciplinary study, Heffernan uses modernist and post-modernist novels as evidence of the diminished faith in the existence of an inherently meaningful end. Probing the cultural and historical reasons for this shift in the understanding of apocalypse, she also considers the political implications of living in a world that does not rely on revelation as an organizing principle.

With fascinating readings of works by William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, Ford Madox Ford, Toni Morrison, E.M. Forster, Salman Rushdie, D.H. Lawrence, and Angela Carter, Post-Apocalyptic Culture is a provocative study of how twentieth-century culture and society responded to a world in which a belief in the end had been exhausted.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442627000
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	02/26/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Teresa Heffernan is a professor in the Department of English at St. Mary’s University.

Editorial Reviews

A useful starting point from which to examine the aesthetics of fiction being produced in the twenty-first century.”
;—Ivan Stacy, Modern Language Review
“Especially worthwhile for students of apocalypticism and also for students of twentieth-century fiction.”—Jesse Wolfe, Kritikon Litterarum

From the Publisher

Especially worthwhile for students of apocalypticism and also for students of twentieth-century fiction.

Kritikon Litterarum - Jesse Wolfe

A useful starting point from which to examine the aesthetics of fiction being produced in the twenty-first century.” ;

Modern Language Review - Ivan Stacy

Especially worthwhile for students of apocalypticism and also for students of twentieth-century fiction.”

Jesse Wolfe

A useful starting point from which to examine the aesthetics of fiction being produced in the twenty-first century.”
;

Ivan Stacy