The End of Modern Civilization and Humankind’s Formative Path in the Post-Apocalyptic World Imagined by Western Literature (1800-1950)

Abstract

Western modernity is associated with the imposition of new values ​​linked with ​​religion, State, individual, and also with the imposition of boundaries between culture and nature. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the hegemony of modern society reached its apex. In this historical context of cultural transformations, literary texts of the “post-apocalyptic” genre emerged, imagining the end of the world not by divine elements associated with religious eschatology, but through the idea of ​​“Nature” and its destructive potentialities, such as environmental disasters. The present work addresses some views present in such literature as the result of anxieties about the future and critical readings of the modern world. Our hypothesis is that the literary “secular apocalypse” represents, above all, the end of the modern, of its values ​​and beliefs, when taken to exhaustion. We’ll understand post-apocalyptic literature from the perspective of Environmental History and Ecocriticism, aiming to explain the critical perception of modern civilization and the projection of an environmental future of the planet in which wild nature restores its hegemony, as imagined by anglophone writers, in works written between the 1800s and 1950s.