In the years following 9/11, American TV developed a preoccupation with apocalypse. Science fiction and fantasy shows ranging from Firefly to Heroes, from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica to Lost, envisaged scenarios in which world-changing disasters were either threatened or actually took place. During the same period numerous commentators observed that the American media's representation of gender had undergone a marked regression, possibly, it was suggested, as a consequence of the 9/11 attacks and the feelings of weakness and insecurity they engendered in the nation's men. Eve Bennett investigates whether the same impulse to return to traditional images of masculinity and femininity can be found in the contemporary cycle of apocalyptic series, programmes which, like 9/11 itself, present plenty of opportunity for narratives of damsels-in-distress and heroic male rescuers. However, as this book shows, whether such narratives play out in the expected manner is another matter.

Apocalytic literature has addressed human concerns for over two millennia. This volume surveys the source texts, their reception, and relevance.

Apocalypticism arose in ancient Judaism in the last centuries BCE and played a crucial role in the rise of Christianity. It is not only of historical interest: there has been a growing awareness, especially since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, of the prevalence of apocalyptic beliefs in the contemporary world. To understand these beliefs, it is necessary to appreciate their complex roots in the ancient world, and the multi-faceted character of the phenomenon of apocalypticism. The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature is a thematic and phenomenological exploration of apocalypticism in the Judaic and Christian traditions. Most of the volume is devoted to the apocalyptic literature of antiquity. Essays explore the relationship between apocalypticism and prophecy, wisdom and mysticism; the social function of apocalypticism and its role as resistance literature; apocalyptic rhetoric from both historical and postmodern perspectives; and apocalyptic theology, focusing on phenomena of determinism and dualism and exploring apocalyptic theology's role in ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and Gnosticism. The final chapters of the volume are devoted to the appropriation of apocalypticism in the modern world, reviewing the role of apocalypticism in contemporary Judaism and Christianity, and more broadly in popular culture, addressing the increasingly studied relation between apocalypticism and violence, and discussing the relationship between apocalypticism and trauma, which speaks to the underlying causes of the popularity of apocalyptic beliefs. This volume will further the understanding of a vital religious phenomenon too often dismissed as alien and irrational by secular western society.

How will the world end? Doomsday ideas in Western history have been both persistent and adaptable, peaking at various times, including in modern America. Public opinion polls indicate that a substantial number of Americans look for the return of Christ or some catastrophic event. The views expressed in these polls have been reinforced by the market process. Whether through purchasing paperbacks or watching television programs, millions of Americans have expressed an interest in end-time events. Americans have a tremendous appetite for prophecy, more than nearly any other people in the modern world. Why do Americans love doomsday? In Apocalyptic Fever, Richard Kyle attempts to answer this question, showing how dispensational premillennialism has been the driving force behind doomsday ideas. Yet while several chapters are devoted to this topic, this book covers much more. It surveys end-time views in modern America from a wide range of perspectives--dispensationalism, Catholicism, science, fringe religions, the occult, fiction, the year 2000, Islam, politics, the Mayan calendar, and more.

The Religious Right came to prominence in the early 1980s, but it was born during the early Cold War. Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham, driven by a fierce opposition to communism, led evangelicals out of the political wilderness they'd inhabited since the Scopes trial and into a much more active engagement with the important issues of the day. How did the conservative evangelical culture move into the political mainstream? Angela Lahr seeks to answer this important question. She shows how evangelicals, who had felt marginalized by American culture, drew upon their eschatological belief in the Second Coming of Christ and a subsequent glorious millennium to find common cause with more mainstream Americans who also feared a a 'soon-coming end,' albeit from nuclear war. In the early postwar climate of nuclear fear and anticommunism, the apocalyptic eschatology of premillennial dispensationalism embraced by many evangelicals meshed very well with the "secular apocalyptic" mood of a society equally terrified of the Bomb and of communism. She argues that the development of the bomb, the creation of the state of Israel, and the Cuban Missile Crisis combined with evangelical end-times theology to shape conservative evangelical political identity and to influence secular views. Millennial beliefs influenced evangelical interpretation of these events, repeatedly energized evangelical efforts, and helped evangelicals view themselves and be viewed by others as a vital and legitimate segment of American culture, even when it raised its voice in sharp criticism of aspects of that culture. Conservative Protestants were able to take advantage of this situation to carve out a new space for their subculture within the national arena. The greater legitimacy that evangelicals gained in the early Cold War provided the foundation of a power-base in the national political culture that the religious right would draw on in the late seventies and early eighties. The result, she demonstrates, was the alliance of religious and political conservatives that holds power today.

How nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to shape American culture In nineteenth-century America, "apocalypse" referred not to the end of the world but to sacred revelation, and "geography" meant both the physical landscape and its representation in printed maps, atlases, and pictures. In Apocalyptic Geographies, Jerome Tharaud explores how white Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to present the antebellum landscape as a “sacred space” of spiritual pilgrimage, and how devotional literature influenced secular society in important and surprising ways. Reading across genres and media—including religious tracts and landscape paintings, domestic fiction and missionary memoirs, slave narratives and moving panoramas—Apocalyptic Geographies illuminates intersections of popular culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the spiritual narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. Placing works of literature and visual art—from Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—into new contexts, Tharaud traces the rise of evangelical media, the controversy and backlash it engendered, and the role it played in shaping American modernity.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1, University of Graz (Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: This thesis investigates the relationship between apocalyptic fiction and reality during the Cold War era. By exploring the zeitgeist and media landscape of the American Cold War culture, this thesis demonstrates that apocalyptic fiction had a significant bilateral role during those times and influenced the contemporary nuclear discourse. This is illustrated by analyzing two popular apocalyptic movies, "On the Beach" (1959) and "The Day After" (1983). Both films portray a worst-case scenario in which the protagonists are confronted with the disastrous consequences of a nuclear war. These movies are not just blockbusters for entertainment but fuel and contribute to the ongoing nuclear discourse about the Cold War era and its politics of deterrence. In its theoretical part, this thesis provides an overview of the Cold War era and reveals how the beginning of the Atomic Age changed the dynamics of power and politics forever. It focuses on the international cultural discourse concerned with nuclear weaponry and illustrates how the politics of deterrence came into being. Afterwards, this thesis focuses on the US- specific nuclear discourse and how it was portrayed in US mainstream media. Additionally, this thesis engages with the Cold War as a concept of thought. It aims at providing a deeper understanding of its intrinsic mechanisms and explains why the Cold War can be classified as a war against people’s imagination. Therefore, this thesis provides an overview of modern apocalypticism research and investigates the role of narratives in the Atomic Age. In its analytical part, the films On the Beach (1959) and The Day After (1983) are interpreted as crisis texts according to the paradigm of apocalypticism. According to this analytical approach, this film analysis focuses on the films’ contemporary cultural context and investigates how their narratives are related to the political and cultural events of the Cold War. Furthermore, this thesis investigates how the bilateral relationship between fiction and reality impact the films and their public reception. Thus, this thesis demonstrates how the films serve as an example of how and why the Cold War can be classified as a war against people’s imagination.

In this volume, the first panoramic study of music in the apocalyptic mode, an international and trans-disciplinary array of scholars and composers explore the resonance of the ancient biblical Revelation of John across the centuries in musical works as diverse as El Cant de la Sibil·la, the Dies Irae, cantatas and oratorios by Bach and Telemann, Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, African American Spirituals, Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, Christian “ApokRock,” Hip-hop, Grimes’s album Miss Anthropocene, and the songs of Bob Marley and Bob Dylan. This innovative volume will engage scholars, students, and all those interested in the intersection of music, religion, history, and popular culture.

Apocalyptic Transformation explores how one the oldest sense-making paradigms, the apocalyptic myth, is altered when postmodern authors and filmmakers adopt it. It examines how postmodern writers adapt a fundamentally religious story for a secular audience and it proposes that even as these writers use the myth in traditional ways, they simultaneously undermine and criticize the grand narrative of apocalypse itself.