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Author: Christopher Star
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2021-12-07
Total Pages: 319
ISBN-13: 1421441632
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"This book investigates the various ways that ancient Greek and Roman authors envisioned the end of the world and the role they gave to global catastrophes, both past and future, in shaping human history"--
Author: Christopher Star
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2021-12-07
Total Pages: 319
ISBN-13: 1421441640
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow did the ancient Greeks and Romans envision the end of the world? What is the long-term future of the human race? Will the world always remain as it is or will it undergo a catastrophic change? What role do the gods, human morality, and the forces of nature play in bringing about the end of the world? In Apocalypse and Golden Age, Christopher Star reveals the answers that Greek and Roman authors gave to these questions. The first large-scale investigation of the various scenarios for the end of the world in classical texts, this book demonstrates that key thinkers often viewed their world as shaped by catastrophe. Star focuses on how this theme was explored over the centuries in the works of poets, such as Hesiod, Vergil, Ovid, and Lucan, and by philosophers, including the Presocratics, Plato, Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca. With possibilities ranging from periodic terrestrial catastrophes to the total dissolution of the world, these scenarios address the ultimate limits that define human life and institutions, and place humanity in the long perspective of cosmic and natural history. These texts also explore various options for the rebirth of society after world catastrophe, such as a return of the Golden Age or the redevelopment of culture and political institutions. Greek and Roman visions of the end, Star argues, are not calls to renounce this world and prepare for a future kingdom. Rather, they are set within larger investigations that examine and seek to improve personal and political life in the present. Contextualizing classical thought about the apocalypse with biblical studies, Star shows that the seeds of our contemporary anxieties about globalization, politics, and technology were sown during the Roman period. Even the prevalent link between an earthly leader and the beginning of the end times can be traced back to Greek and Roman rulers, the emperor Nero in particular. Apocalypse and Golden Age enriches our understanding of apocalyptic thought.
Author: Jesse A. Hoover
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 019882551X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age examines an apocalypse that never happened, seen through the eyes of a dissident church that no longer exists. Jesse A. Hoover considers Donatists, members of an ecclesiastical communion that for a brief moment formed the majority church in Roman North Africa--modern Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya--before fading away sometime between the fifth and seventh centuries. Hoover studies how Donatists perceived the end of the world to offer a glimpse into the inner life of the dissident communion: what it valued, whom it feared, and how it defined its place in history while on the cusp of history's end. By recovering these appeals to apocalyptic themes in surviving Donatist writings, this study uncovers a significant element within the dissident movement's self-perception that has so far gone unexamined. In contrast to previous assessments, it argues that such eschatological expectations are not out of sync with the wider world of Latin Christianity in late antiquity, and that they functioned as an effective polemical strategy designed to counter their opponents' claim to be the true church in North Africa.
Author: Brent Ryan Bellamy
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2021-03-08
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 0819580333
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores the post-apocalyptic novel in American literature from the 1940s to the present as reflections of a growing anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. Post-apocalyptic novels imagine human responses to the aftermath of catastrophe. The shape of the future they imagine is defined by "the remainder," when what is left behind expresses itself in storytelling tropes. Since 1945 the portentous fate of the United States has shifted from the irradiated future of nuclear holocaust to the saltwater wash of global warming. Theorist Brent Ryan Bellamy illuminates the political unconscious of post-apocalyptic writing, drawing on a range of disciplinary fields, including science fiction studies, American studies, energy humanities research, and critical race theory. From George R. Stewart's Earth Abides to N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, Remainders of the American Century describes the tension between a reactionary impulse and the progressive impetus for a new world. "Brent Ryan Bellamy weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of fictions, all of which navigate the changing valences of apocalypse, survival, and remainders during the rise and fall of the post-Second World War 'American Century.' Given the global post-apocalyptic reality we all currently inhabit, this is a timely and significant study." "Brent Ryan Bellamy weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of fictions, all of which navigate the changing valences of apocalypse, survival, and remainders during the rise and fall of the post-Second World War 'American Century.' Given the global post-apocalyptic reality we all currently inhabit, this is a timely and significant study." —Gerry Canavan, author of Octavia E. Butler
Author: Richard Landes
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 377
ISBN-13: 0195111915
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe essays in this volume challenge prevailing views on the way in which apocalyptic concerns contributed to larger processes of social change at the first millennium. They should provoke new interest in and debate on the nature and causes of social change in early medieval Europe.
Author: Thomas Bromwell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2024-11-29
Total Pages: 327
ISBN-13: 1040256309
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is the first substantial study of the presence and relationship with the concepts of apocalypse, eschatology, and millennium in modern British art from 1914 to 1945, addressing how and why practitioners in both religious and secular spheres turned to the subjects. The volume examines British art and visual culture’s relationship with the then-contemporary anxieties and hopes regarding the orientation of society and culture, arguing that there is an acute relationship to the particular forms of cultural discourse of eschatology, apocalypse, and millennium. Chapters identify the continued relevance of religion and religious themes in British art during the period, and demonstrate that eschatology, apocalypse, and millennium were thriving and surprisingly mainstream concepts in the period that remained vital in early to mid-twentieth-century society and culture. This book is a research monograph aimed at an audience of scholars and graduate students already familiar with the core focus of modern British art and cultural histories, especially those working on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or the concepts of apocalypse, eschatology, and millennium in Theology, Sociology, or other disciplinary settings. It will also be of interest to scholars and students working on war and visual culture, or histories of imperialism. It will benefit scholars of early twentieth-century British art, demonstrating the intersection of art and religion in the modern era, and critically qualifies the standard secular canon and narrative of modern British art, and the general neglect of religion in existing art-historical literature.
Author: Norman Cheadle
Publisher: Tamesis
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 182
ISBN-13: 1855660709
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA fresh look at the Argentine novelist Marechal emphasises his subversive approach in his novels to the Peronist politics of his time. Leopoldo Marechal has become a chosen precursor of many contemporary Argentine writers, cineastes, and intellectuals, and so his novels - universally recognized but rarely studied - demand treatment from a contemporary critical sensibility. This study departs from the line of criticism that reads Marechal as a Christian apologist, arguing instead that Marechal's `metaphysical' novels are really metafictional, ludic exercises informed by ironic scepticism.Adán Buenosayres (1948) inverts the Christian-Platonist narrative of redemption through the Logos; in El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) Marechal, tongue firmly in cheek, leads his readers on a metaphysical wild-goose chase; and in Megafón, o la guerra (1970) he finally lays apocalypticism to rest. The close readings of his novels presented in this book help to lay the theoretical groundwork underpinning Marechal's reinscription incontemporary Argentine culture.
Author: Stephen J. Shoemaker
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2018-11-09
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 0812250400
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn The Apocalypse of Empire, Stephen J. Shoemaker argues that earliest Islam was a movement driven by urgent eschatological belief that focused on the conquest, or liberation, of the biblical Holy Land and situates this belief within a broader cultural environment of apocalyptic anticipation. Shoemaker looks to the Qur'an's fervent representation of the imminent end of the world and the importance Muhammad and his earliest followers placed on imperial expansion. Offering important contemporary context for the imperial eschatology that seems to have fueled the rise of Islam, he surveys the political eschatologies of early Byzantine Christianity, Judaism, and Sasanian Zoroastrianism at the advent of Islam and argues that they often relate imperial ambition to beliefs about the end of the world. Moreover, he contends, formative Islam's embrace of this broader religious trend of Mediterranean late antiquity provides invaluable evidence for understanding the beginnings of the religion at a time when sources are generally scarce and often highly problematic. Scholarship on apocalyptic literature in early Judaism and Christianity frequently maintains that the genre is decidedly anti-imperial in its very nature. While it may be that early Jewish apocalyptic literature frequently displays this tendency, Shoemaker demonstrates that this quality is not characteristic of apocalypticism at all times and in all places. In the late antique Mediterranean as in the European Middle Ages, apocalypticism was regularly associated with ideas of imperial expansion and triumph, which expected the culmination of history to arrive through the universal dominion of a divinely chosen world empire. This imperial apocalypticism not only affords an invaluable backdrop for understanding the rise of Islam but also reveals an important transition within the history of Western doctrine during late antiquity.
Author: Rev. James BONNAR
Publisher:
Published: 1871
Total Pages: 470
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Richard G. Kyle
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2012-08-01
Total Pages: 378
ISBN-13: 162189410X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow 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.
