Everyday Apocalypse

Mining popular media, Dark redefines the term apocalypse as a more honest, watchful way of being in the world and higlights how the imagination can expose our moral condition.

This wide-ranging exploration of the apocalypse in Western culture seeks to understand how we have come to be so preoccupied with spectacular visions of our own annihilation—offering abundant examples of the changing nature of our imagined destruction, and predisposing readers to discover many more all around them. The Apocalypse Is Everywhere: A Popular History of America's Favorite Nightmare explores why apocalyptic thinking exists, how it has been manifested in Western culture through the ages, and how it has woven itself so thoroughly into our popular culture today. Beginning with contemporary apocalyptic expressions, the book demonstrates how surprisingly widespread they are. It then discusses how we inherited them and where they arose. Author Annie Rehill surveys the ancient belief systems from which Christianity evolved, including ancient Judaism and other faiths. She explores the vision outlined in the Book of Revelation and traces the apocalyptic thread through the Middle Ages, across the Reformation and Enlightenment, and to the Americas. Finally, to prove that the Apocalypse is indeed everywhere, Rehill returns to the present to consider the idea of apocalypse as it occurs in movies, books, comics and graphic novels, games, music, and art, as well asin televangelism and even presidential speeches. Her fascinating scholarship will surely have readers looking about them with new eyes.

Eschatology played a central role in both politics and society throughout the early modern period. It inspired people to strive for social and political change, including sometimes by violent means, and prompted in return strong reactions against their religious activism. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, numerous apocalyptical and messianic movements came to the fore across Eurasia and North Africa, raising questions about possible interconnections. Why were eschatological movements so pervasive in early modern times? This volume provides some answers to this question by exploring the interconnected histories of confessions and religions from Moscow to Cusco. It offers a broad picture of Christian and, to a lesser extent, Jewish and Islamic eschatological movements from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, thereby bridging important and long-standing gaps in the historiography. Apocalypse Now will appeal to both researchers and students of the history of early modern religion and politics in the Christian, Jewish and Islamic worlds. By exploring connections between numerous eschatological movements, it gives a fresh insight into one of the most promising fields of European and global history.

Part catharsis, part diagnosis, this divinely wry collection from New Yorker and McSweeney’s satirist Eli Grober will strike a chord with readers who are dismayed by the chaos of our times. None of it will help—but a few good laughs won’t hurt. Probably. There’s a lot going on, all the time. It may feel overwhelming. Don’t worry. It will end. This Won’t Help is here for you in the meantime—with 100 short, sharp, satirical essays that skewer a world raging with inaction, while maximizing the profits of self-destruction. As if that would help! Eli Grober’s biting, Swiftian prose spares no one—not the megalomaniacal billionaire fleeing Earth for a better life on unlivable Mars, not an extremely online family living completely off-grid, not even a fossil-fuel lobbyist insisting we all stop using straws. (Eli does spare a kind thought for the supremely intelligent readers with the good sense to buy this book.) Maybe, just maybe, descending through the inferno of our environmental, economic, and political landscape will help us find real solutions to the hypocrisy and dysfunction that surrounds us. But probably not.

We live in challenging times. There is overwhelming evidence that massive change is required in order to survive impending environmental collapse. Yet this fifth volume in the Archifutures series takes the position that the “apocalypse” is not an imminent event, but an insidious process that is already happening. Communities everywhere are facing it on a day-to-day basis. Many are already resisting and adapting. Despite the implied drama of the word “apocalypse”, the reality is actually far more mundane: surviving it is not about building bunkers, it is about building resilience – everywhere and in all kinds of ways.

Australia has been a frequent choice of location for narratives about the end of the world in science fiction and speculative works, ranging from pre-colonial apocalyptic maps to key literary works from the last fifty years. This critical work explores the role of Australia in both apocalyptic literature and film. Works and genres covered include Nevil Shute’s popular novel On the Beach, Mad Max, children’s literature, Indigenous writing, and cyberpunk. The text examines ways in which apocalypse is used to undermine complacency, foretell environmental disasters, critique colonization, and to serve as a means of protest for minority groups. Australian apocalypse imagines Australia at the ends of the world, geographically and psychologically, but also proposes spaces of hope for the future.

This collection examines the child’s role in contemporary post-apocalyptic films and television.. By exploring the function of child characters within a dystopian framework, this volume illustrates how traditional notions of childhood are tethered to sites of adult conflict and disaster, a connection that often works to reaffirm the “rightness” of past systems of social order.