The Way The World Ends?

Don't jump!

This is the cover of a piece of serious academic research...
(although weirdly this picture from Amazon is a bit off-centre)

I've just been round to John Lyons' to have a look at the first copy hot of the press, and it looks fantastic.

Here's the blurb and contents: (My own chapter is about half way down...)

The richly varied collection of 15 essays in this volume showcase the afterlife of the Book of Revelation. It is a biblical book that has left its mark in many fields of intellectual endeavour: literature, film, music, philosophy, political theology, and religious ideology. It is perhaps paradoxical that this book, which promises God’s punishment upon anyone expanding on its contents, has nevertheless accumulated to itself over two millennia vast amounts of commentary, exposition, and appropriation.

Offered at the close of the ‘Blair/Bush years’, this volume also exposes and highlights the often deeply ironic resonances generated while studying the reception history of Revelation during a period when the book has both significant public currency and a potentially terrifying global impact.

• Setting the Scene: The End of the Bible, the End of the World (Jorunn Økland)
• Decoding, Reception History, Poetry: Three Hermeneutical Approaches to the Apocalypse (Jonathan Roberts)
• Laying Hold of Divine Riches: Self-Authorization in Christina Rossetti’s The Face of the Deep (1892) (Jo Carruthers)
• Revelation, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case (Alison Jack)
• ‘Every eye shall see him’: Revelation and Film (Melanie J. Wright)
• The Apocalypse according to Johnny Cash: Examining the ‘Effect’ of the Book of Revelation on a Contemporary Apocalyptic Writer (William John Lyons)
• The Johannine Apocalypse and the Risk of Knowledge (James E. Harding)
• Revelation, Violence, and War: Glimpses of a Dark Side (Heikki Räisänen)
• Observations on the Reception of Revelation, c. 1250–1700: Apocalyptic Prophecy as Refractory Lens (Anke Holdenried)
• The Plain and Literal Meaning of the Text: A Seventeenth-Century Particular Baptist Perspective on Revelation 20.1-7 (Simon Woodman)
• ‘Be thou faithful unto death’ (cf. Rev. 2.10): The Book of Revelation, the Branch Davidians and Apocalyptic (Self-)Destruction? (Kenneth Newport)
• Earth Left Behind? Ecological Readings of the Apocalypse of John in Contemporary America (Michael S. Northcott)
• Feminists in Search for a Usable Future: Feminist Reception of the Book of Revelation (Hanna Stenström)
• The Spectre Revealed and Made Manifest: The Book of Revelation in the Writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Jorunn Økland)
• The Interdisciplinary Colloquium on the Book of Revelation and Effective History (Christopher Rowland)