The Apocalyptic Imagination - Gladstone Centre for Victorian Studies Conference
The Apocalypse is coming…
Keynote Speakers:
Linnie Blake (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Andrew Tate (Lancaster University)
Please note: All bookings are made through Gladstone's Library's group bookings system. Please contact [email protected] for details.
Since the formation of the New Testament canon, the Apocalypse has occupied a curious and often liminal place in literary and cultural history. The canonicity of the Book of Revelation has been disputed often and by some of Christianity’s most influential figures. Yet the Apocalypse has also been regarded as the ending that gives shape and purpose to biblical metanarrative and to history. It remains central to Christian eschatology, though its proper interpretation is contested vigorously.
For much modern literary criticism – perhaps most notably Frank Kermode’s seminal study The Sense of an Ending (1967) – the Apocalypse has been read as a model for the end-directed orientation of secular as well as religious narrative.
Yet for many critics this literary ‘sense of an ending’ can be little more than a consoling fiction; for others, it is an artificial closure imposed upon the endlessly open processes of reading and interpretation.
This conference brings together scholars across a range of literatures and critical perspectives in order to explore the place of and approaches to the apocalyptic tradition in contemporary criticism.
Does the ‘sense of an ending’ remain an appropriate framework for our reading of apocalyptic texts?
In what ways might modern criticism read and respond to the apocalyptic writings of earlier literary periods?
What have notions of apocalypse come to mean for the secular – or post-secular – imagination, particularly in the contexts of genocide, nuclear threat, global terrorism and environmental catastrophe?
The biblical Apocalypse concludes with a vision of a ‘new heaven and a new earth’.
If our contemporary apocalypse has become the ‘end of history’, does it also retain its imaginative aspiration to ‘make all things new’?
We invite proposals for papers of approximately 20 minutes focusing upon literatures of any period(s).
We welcome interdisciplinary approaches from scholars working in fields including – but by no means limited to – politics, philosophy, theology, film studies, history and art.
Possible topics might include:
- Literary responses to and/or rewritings of the Book of Revelation and other biblical apocalyptic texts
- Apocalypse and eschatology
- Relationships between apocalyptic literatures and political theory/theology
- Apocalyptic literatures and the ‘end of history’
- Apocalypse and literary theory
- Apocalypse and catastrophe (e.g. environmental, nuclear, humanitarian, etc.)
- Versions of apocalypse in Gothic, Science Fiction and Fantasy literatures
- Endings, interpretation and (re)reading
The all-inclusive fee to attend is £125 (best available room).
A day only delegate fee is £40 per person.
Anyone wishing to stay an extra night on the 8 July can do so at the clergy/student B&B rate of 20% discount.
In conjunction with the University of Liverpool.