Literature of Crisis and Apocalypse PAMLA Panel
Apocalyptic literature and its study have typically centered around notions of Christian eschatology, i.e. the judgement presented in the Book of Revelations. However, the aftermath of the second world war helped reshape our notions of this genre. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has begun to examine the relations between humans and the Earth during the Anthropocene. Images of global thermonuclear war, fears of communism, and a burgeoning climate change (with its subsequent and constituent crises) have eclipsed the teleological notions of divine creation and its eventual, inexorable movement towards eschatology.