Literary Imagination and the End of the World

Apocalypse has been one of the most persistent obsessions of British literary imagination, and this course treats that fixation as a serious lens for reading social and political anxiety from Milton through Beckett and into Gibson's cyberpunk. You'll do close readings across poetry, drama, and fiction, work through two midterms and a final, and write an essay that takes the theme of world-ending seriously as a moral and historical argument rather than a genre convention. It pairs naturally with other ELIT period and theory courses, and rewards students who want to see how literature processes collective dread, from early modern cosmology to late-twentieth-century technological collapse.