Picturing the end of the world is one of the most enduring of cultural practices. The ways in which people of different historical periods conceive of this endpoint reveals a great deal about their imagination and philosophical horizons. This groundbreaking collection of essays offers an overview of the Apocalyptic imagination as it presents itself in French literature and culture from the thirteenth century to the present day. The contributors analyse material as diverse as medieval French biblical commentaries and twenty-first-century science fiction, taking in established canonical authors alongside contemporary figures and less well-known writers. The book also considers a vast range of other subject matter, including horror films, absurdist drama, critical theory, medieval manuscript illuminations and seventeenth-century theology. Moving from the sacred to the profane, the sublime to the obscene, the divine to the post-human, the volume opens up more than 750 years of French Apocalypticism to critical scrutiny.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Daron Burrows: ‘Vers la fin croistra la religion’: The End of the World According to the Medieval French Prose Apocalypse – Nigel Morgan: Three French Fourteenth-Century Apocalypses as Reinterpretations of English Thirteenth-Century Predecessors – Adeline Lionetto-Hesters: Ronsard’s Bergerie: From Pastoral Dream to Apocalyptic Reverie – Kathryn Banks: Apocalypse and Literature in the Sixteenth Century: The Case of Rabelais and the Frozen Words – Nathan Parker: Proselytism and Apocalypticism in England Before and After the Act of Toleration of 1689: The French Threat and a Lone Puritan – Michel Arouimi: Rimbaud’s Apocalypse: Founding Principles and Literary Repercussions (Bosco, Ramuz) – Marie Vélikanov: Eschatology in the Poetry of Charles Péguy – Maria Manuel Lisboa: This World is Not the Case: Apocalypse in J.H. Rosny Ainé – Jennifer Rushworth: ‘Alors la résurrection aura pris fin’: Visions of the End in Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu – Crispin Lee: Georges Bataille or the Theory and Fiction of Apocalyptic Visions – Ana-Maria M’Enesti: Dialectics of Apocalyptic Imagery in Eugène Ionesco’s Plays – Lara Cox: Absurd Visions of the Apocalypse: Adamov, Arrabal and Ionesco and a Politics of Spectatorship for the Postmodern Age – Susannah Ellis: Writing in the Aftermath: The Figure of the Untermensch in Antoine Volodine’s Des Anges mineurs – Tony Thorström: The Corporeal Apocalypse: Antagonistic Visions of the Human Body in Michel Houellebecq’s La Possibilité d’une île (2005) – Angus MacDonald: New French Horror and the End of the World As We Know It.