The Promised End

Paul S. Fiddes is Principal of Regent's Park College in the University of Oxford, and a University Research Lecturer in Theology. He is the author of a number of books and articles, including The Creative Suffering of God (1988), Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement (1989), and Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue Between Literature and Christian Doctrine (1991).

Acknowledgements. Part I: Facing the End:.

1. The Problem of Closure: John Fowles' the French Lieutenant's Woman and Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot.

2. Theology and Literature - A Dialogue.

3. The End Organizes the Human Story: Frank Kermode.

4. The End Discloses a Desired World: Northrop Frye.

5. Biblical Eschatology and Openness.

6. Closure and Openness in Ending.

Part II: Deferment and Hope:.

7. The End Defers Meaning: Jacques Derrida.

8. Death and the Other.

9. Openness and Relativism.

10. The End Opens Hope: Paul Ricoeur.

11. Hope and a Passion for the Possible.

12. Hoping in the Face of Death.

Part III: Taking Death Seriously:.

13. A Journey to Nothingness: Shakespeare's King Lear.

14. Human Surplus and Excess.

15. Images of a Desirable and Undesirable World.

16. The Configuring of Time.

17. Looking Upon Death.

18. Death the Last Enemy.

19. Creation from Nothing.

Part IV: A Question of Identity:.

20. Resurrection and the Idea of Replication.

21. Problems About Identity.

22. Closing the Gap? A Modified Dualism.

23. The Person and the Finality of Death.

24. Survival and Relationships: Doris Lessing's Memoirs of A Survivor.

25. Corporate Resurrection.

26. The Identity of the Self: Lessing's the Making of the Representative for Planet 8.

27. The Making of the Person.

Part V: the Eternal Moment:.

28. The Problem of Fragmentation By Time: T.S. Eliot's 'Ash Wednesday'.

29. The Problem of Isolation in Time: Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.

30. Eliot and the Timeless Moment: the Four Quartets.

31. Eternity as Simultaneity?.

32. The Healing of Time.

33. Woolf and the Symbols of Eternity: to the Lighthouse and Between the Acts.

Part VI: Expecting the Unexpected:.

34. Two Parables of Waiting.

35. The Reversal of Expectations.

36. Two Plays of Waiting: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame.

37. The Futility of Waiting: (A) Waiting for the 'Not Yet'.

38. Waiting For a Possible Future.

39. The Futility of Waiting: (B) A Programmed Future.

Part VII: The Arrow of Time:.

40. The One-Way Flight of the Arrow.

41. The Arrow Points Backwards: Martin Amis' Time's Arrow.

42. The Counter-Movement to Evolution.

43. Cycles of Torment and Renewal: Flann O'Brien's the Third Policeman and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

44. Preservation and Retroaction.

45. The Eternal Dance.

Part VIII: A Fuller Presence:.

46. The Desire for Presence.

47. Millennium and Utopia.

48. Fictional Images of Utopia: Aldous Huxley's Island and Ursula Leguin's the Dispossessed.

49. The Postmodern Critique of Full Presence.

50. Absence at the Heart of Existence.

51. Theological Versions of Hidden Presence.

52. The Millennial Hope.

Part IX: Our Eternal Dwelling-Place:.

53. Participating in Triune Relationships.

54. Dwelling in Triune Spaces.

55. Particularity and Eschatology.

56. The Eternal City.

Index.