The End All Around Us: Apocalyptic Texts and Popular Culture

by Walliss,John

• ISBN13: 9781845532611
• ISBN10: 1845532619
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781317491026
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-08-08
• Publisher: Routledge
• More Book Details

Summary

For centuries the apocalypse has been a recurrent theme within art, literature, music, and more recently cinema. Within the context of contemporary popular culture its influence may be felt in areas as diverse as extreme metal music, disaster movies, anime and manga, Science Fiction dystopianism and the Left Behind series of novels. The aim of this collection of essays is to examine the influence of apocalyptic texts on popular cultural products, focusing on the timelessness and malleability of their themes to audiences. Chapters will focus on the influence of such texts within the areas of film, music, literature, and the internet.

Author Biography

John Walliss is Director of the Centre for Millennialism Studies and Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Relig on the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. Kenneth G.C Newport is Pro Vice Chancellor and Professor of Christian Thought in the Department of Thelogy and Religious Studies, Liverpool Hope University.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. vii
Introduction	p. ix
Songs of fate, hope and oblivion: Bob Dylan's dystopianism and apocalyticism	p. 1
End of the world music: is extreme metal the sound of the apocalypse?	p. 22
Babylon's burning: reggae, Rastafari, and millenarianism
Apocalypse at the millennium	p. 71
"The days are unmbered": the romance of death, doom, and deferral in contemporary apocalypse films	p. 97
Making things new: regeneration and transcendence in Anime	p. 120
Selling faith without selling out: reading the left Behind novels in the context of popular culture	p. 148
"The shadow of the end": the appeal of apocalypse in literary science fiction	p. 173
An end times virtual "Ekklesia": ritual deliberation in participatory media	p. 198
Index
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