The Ongoing End: On the Limits of Apocalyptic Narrative

Michael Titlestad is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He writes extensively on South African literature and culture, and also on modernist writing, particularly maritime fiction. In addition to co-editing English Studies in South Africa with Sofia Kostelac, he edits fiction. David Watson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Uppsala University, Sweden, where he specializes in American literature and culture. He has published on 19th century and modernist American poets, 19th century and contemporary novelists, and issues in transnational and translation studies, on which he has co-edited two volumes—Traversing Transnationalism (2010) and Literature, Geography, Translation: The New Comparative Horizons (2011).

Introduction: The Ongoing End: On the limits of apocalyptic narrative 1. ‘A Shape … Crouching within the shadow of a tomb’: Shelley’s Qualified Apocalypse in ‘The Triumph of Life’ 2. Between Apocalypse and Extinction: Eschatology in Ezra Pound’s Poetry 3. This is not the way the world ends: Richard Hughes’s rejoinder to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies 4. Outlandish Apocalyptics and Creaturely Life in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’ 5. Vanishing Points; or, the Timescapes of the Contemporary American Novel 6. ‘It’s Not Dark Yet, but It’s Getting There’: Listening for the End Times in the Contemporary American Novel 7. Ecological Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy 8. Citrus noir: Strange Fruit in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange