An experiment in critical modernism: Eschatology, prophecy, and revelation in Lewis, Huxley, and Golding.

摘要

Chapters I through III of this thesis seek to advance the study of apocalyptic form, themes, and imagery in fiction, and more specifically British literature from the twentieth century, by demonstrating that critics of the period have tended to apply an exclusively secular concept of literary apocalypse informed by a deep skepticism about the scriptural tradition whence it comes. Chapter I establishes both the significant value of and oversight in critical discourse on this topic, including an analysis of major works on the subject (Kermode and Frye). Chapter II examines the character of Revelation as both sacred scripture and literary object, and posits a model of secularization that accounts for the cumulative assumptions made by what I have termed "critical modernism" about literary apocalypse, showing that this model delimits critical uses of apocalypse to ethical apocalypse, principally in the guise of eschatological anxiety, and discourages the study of texts that involve scriptural apocalypse in other ways. Chapter III identifies and defines prophecy and revelation as companion dimensions to eschatology, and suggests ways of analyzing apocalyptic elements that will help focus and thus enhance the critical use of apocalyptic language. The thesis argues that prophecy and revelation are overlooked as apocalyptic elements chiefly because they occur in a "second stream" of texts that considers the spiritual dimensions of scriptural apocalypse as vital to the uses of apocalypse in the literature of the British twentieth century as the eschatological dimension is known to be.; The second part of the thesis (chapters IV--VI) addresses the absence in critical treatments of apocalypse of the texts in this second stream, and the concomitant absence of scholarship on them, by analyzing the uses of eschatology-as-hope in Wyndham Lewis' Blast and Tarr, the representation of prophetic vocation in Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay and Time Must Have a Stop, and the ontos of revelation in William Golding's Pincher Martin, The Spire, and Darkness Visible.