| This thesis examines the apocalyptic elements of three contemporary British novels: Graham Swift's Waterland, Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, and Zadie Smith's White Teeth. Employing eschatological writing as social criticism, Swift and Smith reveal the crises which they believe threaten social unification and harmony in England, just as Rushdie does with respect to India. Catastrophe and revelation, the two major aspects of apocalyptic theory, provide a common framework for these novels, which are suffused with doomsday prophets, failed redemptions, and mysterious revelations. As a symbol of change, the apocalypse is associated thematically with historiographic approaches in which the repetitive and traumatic past necessarily emerges in the present. The recovery of and from the past, the recognition of ongoing change, and the realization of the need for new beginnings, represent a transition from the old to the new that is dependent on the omnipresent, and often painful, past, and suggest that there is hope for the future. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
