On Apocalypse, Monsters and Mourning

Authors

  • Teresa Heffernan Saint Mary's University

Abstract

If apocalypse literally means unveiling or revelation, why is it that so many twenty-first century popular narratives are caught in an endless loop where disaster never gives way to a new dawn? Why is it that they remain stalled at catastrophe and are unable to imagine a future? What is it that cannot be mourned and what is it that traps the libidinal energies of these narratives in past that cannot give way to a new world? In a reading of the American TV series The Walking Dead and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this paper suggests that “holding onto the hope of humanity” may itself be the problem.

Author Biography

  • Teresa Heffernan, Saint Mary's University

    Teresa Heffernan is Professor of English at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is author of Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel (University of Toronto Press, 2008). She is co-editor (with Daniel O’Quinn) of a critical edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2012); and she is currently working on a new book entitled Modernity, Orientalism, and Islam: Travel Writing and the Figure of the (Un)Veiled Woman. She is co-editor (with Jill Didur) of a special issue of Cultural Studies entitled “Revisiting the Subaltern in the New Empire” and of a special issue of Cultural Critique (with Jill Didur and Bart Simon) on “Posthumanism.” Her work has appeared in journals such as Studies in the Novel, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Arab Journal for the Humanities, Subject Matters, Canadian Literature, and Twentieth Century Literature. She is also coeditor (with Reina Lewis) of “Cultures in Dialogue,” a multi volume project that brings back into circulation travel works by Ottoman, British, and American writers.

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Published

2026-05-04

Issue

Vol. 26 No. 1 (2013): Apocalypse in Contemporary Culture

Section

Main Section

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Heffernan, T. (2026). On Apocalypse, Monsters and Mourning. FRAME, Journal of Literary Studies, 26(1), 93-107. https://platform.openjournals.nl/FRAME/article/view/27429