Professor Mathew Guest m.j.guest@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Keeping the End in Mind: Left Behind, the Apocalypse and the Evangelical Imagination
Guest, Mathew
Authors
Abstract
The Left Behind novels, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, illustrate how rapture fiction has become established as a highly successful subgenre of Christian literature. However, their public reception—within popular and scholarly contexts—reflects an instrumentalisation of the novel that obscures their significance as cultural expressions of evangelical identity. This article challenges this tendency, drawing from social scientific research into reader negotiation of texts within the evangelical world, and argues that both processes of engaging with the novels, and the novels themselves, mirror an evangelicalism that is not simple, univocal or homogeneous, but is complex and conflicted.
Citation
Guest, M. (2012). Keeping the End in Mind: Left Behind, the Apocalypse and the Evangelical Imagination. Literature and Theology, 26(4), 474-488. https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frs053
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Publication Date | Dec 1, 2012 |
Deposit Date | Feb 28, 2012 |
Publicly Available Date | Mar 2, 2016 |
Journal | Literature and Theology |
Print ISSN | 0269-1205 |
Electronic ISSN | 1477-4623 |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 26 |
Issue | 4 |
Pages | 474-488 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frs053 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1481002 |
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Copyright Statement
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Literature and Theology following peer review. The version of record Guest, Mathew (2012). Keeping the End in Mind: Left Behind, the Apocalypse and the Evangelical Imagination. Literature and Theology 26(4): 474-488 is available online at: http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/frs053?.
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