Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction

This is a comparative literary study of apocalyptic themes and narrative techniques in the contemporary North and Latin American novel. Zamora explores the history of the myth of apocalypse, from the Bible to medieval and later interpretations, and relates this to the development of American apocalyptic attitudes. She demonstrates that the symbolic tensions inherent in the apocalyptic myth have special meaning for postmodern writers.

Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction: the apocolyptic vision and fictions of historic desire; 2. Apocalypse and human time in the fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez; 3. Apocolypse and entropy: physics and the fiction of Thomas Pynchon; 4. Art and revolution in the fiction of Julio Cortazar; 5. The Apocalypse of Style: John Barth\'s Self-Consuming Fiction; 6. Apocolypse and renewal: Walker Percy and the US South; 7. Beyond apocalypse: Carlos Fuente’s Terra Nostra; 8. Individual and communal conclusions; Notes; Index.

‘... rarely do we find a work of this calibre with such depth of scholarly grounding and breadth of critical approach … Writing the Apocalypse both informs convincingly and suggests the possibility of further studies in a similar vein … Every Hispanist who is concerned with the dynamics of contemporary literature in Latin America - not to mention the US - should read this excellent work.’ Hispanic Review