This chapter provides a survey of ecclesiastical and monastic organisations and how lay people engaged with them. There was no singular ‘Frankish Church’. There was considerable variation in what people wanted, how the liturgy was arranged, access to church councils and books, and how communities connected to Roman, English, Irish, Spanish, or Byzantine religious worlds. Communities were united by relatively compact beliefs, not least the need for imminent moral reform and penance ahead of an inevitable appearance at Judgement Day – whether it was at hand or far in the future.

This chapter traces the complex legacies of multiple religious traditions, including Christianity, Islam, and syncretistic spirituality, as they inform utopian strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American fiction, including the miraculous realism of Toni Morrison, the lyrical historicism of Marilynne Robinson, and the religiously themed science fiction of James Blish and G. Willow Wilson. Apocalyptic concepts, with a strong emphasis on transformative and liberatory possibility, are a recurrent element of these narratives.  The term “spirituality” itself is ambiguous, particularly in a national context in which religion has been a source of both oppression and hope. The chapter draws on postsecular critiques of literature and culture that, in John McClure’s terms, indicate “a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religion.” It argues that skeptical perspectives do not necessarily militate against the aesthetic and ethical potential of theologically oriented utopian fiction.

This chapter argues that contemporary openings to utopian thinking are confronted by an array of different temporal frameworks that afford radically different possibilities for human agency and cohere with radically different political and ethical demands. These include, on the one hand, the geologic time scale of the Anthropocene, the long historical time informing social activism and social justice movements (e.g., the perspectives afforded by the histories of slavery, genocide, and colonialism), and the utopian perspective of hope or what Ernst Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. These must confront, on the other hand, the cyclical time of economic growth and recession, the exigent time of electoral cycles, and the frozen time of “capitalist realism.” This chapter explores conceptual and fictional responses to this matrix of possibilities, especially in narratives by Cormac McCarthy, Donna Haraway, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

The figure of the child has frequently been seen as central to discourses about the future; this chapter argues that its importance is trumped by the sensorially rich individual body. In Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins (2015), the child introduces a temporality of change and is associated with collectives that can only appear as a threat. In The Rapture (2009) by Liz Jensen, climate events intensify embodiment, while the desolation of apocalypse finds its true aetiology in the compound spectre of parenthood and the public realm. Her (2014, dir. Spike Jonze) is oblivious to climate change but shaped by a valorisation of the human body ensconced in domestic comfort, as it is threatened by the spectre of the mass. In all three fictions, the turn to the body is the denial of a fundamental equality with an Other both within and without the state. The chapter closes by showing how John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) passes from a nationalist dystopia to the germ of a utopian collective in which the legacies of colonialism are finally overcome, to an isolation buoyed by material comfort, in a manner that updates Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe for the Anthropocene.

Wallace’s landscapes are haunted by capitalist interventions in the natural world, from the black sand of the Great Ohio Desert to the Great Convexity/Concavity that sits like a pustule between the United States and Canada. This chapter considers Wallace’s writing as an ecocritical gesture that connects human solipsism, hypercapitalism and the despoiling of the natural world. In tracing this connection, the chapter operates on the central theme of disgust, a recurrent and powerful motif throughout Wallace’s body of work. Working alongside the chapter on regional geographies, the chapter shows how Wallace troubled and complicated the regional archetypes that populate his writing by using images of the unheimlich and the grotesque, uniting the threatening, the decomposing and the simply absurd to highlight the depredations of the late capitalist system on the (American) landscape.

Thomas Browne’s curious A Letter to a Friend (op. post. 1690) is an ars moriendi tract organized on early modern medical ideas about consumption, a disease understood as virtually pyral, a metabolic combustion of the body. Browne’s framing of mortality is more elaborately developed in his celebrated Urne-Buriall (1658), a virtuoso’s survey of worldwide mortuary custom throughout history, and a commentary on the impersonal state of human remains in cremation, inhumation, and other styles of corporeal disposal. Composed in the mid-1650s, these two works on the dust and ashes of mortal relics attend to humans' origin in dust in cognate varieties of burning: the reduction of flesh to dust by pyral and febrile flame, and the apocalyptic fires that will consume the world in ashes on the last day. Ash and dust represent the resistless anonymity of people's particulate fate, and produce anomalies of memory: in Urne-Buriall Browne is absorbed by the vagaries of identifiable remains, their random survival or effacement; in the Letter, however, although the disease itself leaves only wasted bodily fragments, the patient’s exemplary life is recorded and memorialized by Browne as a textual monument.

Chapter 5 turns to a much bleaker vision of the Anthropocene: the widely shared suspicion that catastrophe is all but inevitable. In this part of the book, I attend to various dystopian visions of our climate-changed world, by first delivering a historical overview according to which the apocalypse's construal in public discourse has recently undergone significant transformations. Dystopias perform one major function in this context - they warn an audience about existential threats that are imminent, but whose true causes still remain concealed from public purview. In the case of climate change, we ought to distinguish more specifically, I suggest, between cautionary and post-cautionary narratives. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy navigates this divide by probing where grave dangers might erupt from within the status quo, without suffocating the desire for alternative ways of being and living. Atwood’s books are so insightful because they move back and forth between a storyline that traces how the environmental catastrophe came about and another one that unravels the surprising ways in which the surviving humans collaborate with other species to build a common future.

This chapter covers a large literary category which I call ‘hagiographical’: it includes miracle stories that involve the Virgin Mary, full-length Lives of the Virgin (which began to be produced from the late eighth or early ninth century onward) and two Apocalypses. Many of the texts studied here are composed in a colloquial style that may have appealed to wider audiences in non-liturgical settings. This genre thus contrasts with the liturgical texts that are studied in the first four chapters: according to hagiography, Mary assumes power and agency that goes beyond her theological role in giving birth to Christ. Christians appeal to this female holy figure as one who is able to appeal to Christ and who is willing to help sinners or supplicants who despair of God’s direct favour. Christological teaching persists in these texts, but the emphasis has shifted to Mary’s intercessory role among Christians.

Hermetic spirituality was focused on healing the embodied soul from its corruption by the passions. Analysis of the Poimandres as a visionary revelation in which Hermes Trismegistus receives enlightenment about the nature of reality and the human predicament.

“Postmodern Ecology in Don DeLillo’s Fiction” offers an ecocritical reading of DeLillo’s fiction through the lens of pastoralism, nature studies and apocalypse. Drawing from earlier discussion of ecology in DeLillo’s novel as well as from discussions of ecocrtiticism and place-based studies, this chapter focuses on several of DeLillo’s seminal works, White Noise, Underworld and Zero-K, along with his early short story “Creation” to demonstrate the presentation and evolution of environmental themes and messages throughout his oeuvre. By first looking at DeLillo’s inclusion and inversion of the tradition of pastoral in fiction and then moving towards a consideration of the trope of apocalypse, the chapter aims to prove how DeLillo makes an argument for place-based consciousness and environmental awareness and responsibility throughout his fiction.