Alan Jacobs wrote a post at his blog recently about the rise of detective fiction.
It reminds me that there was another genre that emerged in the 19th century that was evolving in a kind of parallel track before and after The Great War but on "our" side of the Atlantic.
In Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America Crawford Gribben described the literary career of Milton H Stine, a Lutheran who departed from what would be considered orthodox dispensationalism and from his own Lutheran upbringing on the topic of eschatology. Stine managed to lambast the reading of trashy novels earlier in his career before embarking on a career of writing, well, trashy novels! But they were End Times novels. Gribben pointed out that Stine's novels laid the groundwork for a variety of stock characters that have inevitably traipsed through the pages of novels in the End Times idiom across the last 120 years (Stine's The Devil's Bride was published in 1910).
In his brief survey of a deservedly obscure novelist's work, Gribben pointed out that Stine switched from being a postmillennialist to a premillennialist and then away from being a premillennialist. Stine envisioned the greatest threat to "the West" being not the one-world-government that is the cliche of the last half century. No! The great threat to Christendom and civilization lay in unfettered capitalism, international finance and the United States!
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the end-time economic revolution leading to the mark of the beast is headed, not by communists, but by dreamers of the American Dream. The Devil's Bride imagines an international cabal of capitalists, "money barons" who would "dictate the price of bread and meat, of salt and sugar." (Gribben, page 43)
It was only after the October Revolution that End Times/Prophecy Fiction authors in the Anglo-American world resolutely shifted their speculations about Mystery Babylon away from internationalist decadent American capitalists to communists and people from central and eastern Europe. Gribben has done us a favor by slogging through the cloak and dagger tropes of End Times novels to highlight that before The Great War American and British Christian novelists warning of the latter days and tribulation dreaded the tyranny of international capital and were not worried about either a one-world government or a one-world church of the sort that has dominated the End Times novel in the last fairly literal century.
Another point Gribben made early in Writing the Rapture is about the impact of geopolitical and economic issues in eschatological paradigm shifts that informed the budding genre.
... Even as the Civil War began, those postmillennial believers who supported slavery felt that they were "riding the wave of destiny." The ultimate defeat of the South shattered their social optimism and imploded their hopes of conservative progress. In the decades following that defeat, southern evangelicals abandoned postmillennialism as a theology that could no longer explain their social situation, but they developed no clear consensus on what ought to replace it. Gribben, page 50
By contrast ...
The American Civil War confirmed Northern postmillennial hopes at the same time as it challenged Southern ideas of postmillennial progress. page 64
It took The Great War to shatter the entitled utopian postmillennialism of the North. That the whole genre of the End Times novel or Prophecy fiction reflects the fear and resentments of well-off white men is so obvious you might think Crawford Gribben wouldn't even have needed to actually say so at the end of his book but he says it anyway because that's his appraisal as a historian (and a practicing Christian). There's no Good News of Jesus Christ in the entire genre spanning more than 120 years, instead there's the anxieties and resentments of the largely white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men on either side of the Atlantic lamenting the fall of the United States or of England ... although Gribben was careful to note, as quoted above, that before such a thing as communist nation-states existed the evangelical dread was that international capital was going to decimate cultures and the world at large.
Not exactly what we might expect here in 2024, which is why a historical survey of this niche genre of End Times fiction has a small, and for me interesting, light to shed on dystopian storytelling. The End Times novel can be thought of as a kind of who-done-it not for the parlor mystery or the hard-boiled detective story but as a kind of cultural or meta-cultural act of detective work. Of course the genre (if you've read even a handful of these books!) tends to give the game away from the titles. As the detective story evolved in variations of "who done it?" for the individual or family murdered, End Times novels were the "who will do it?"" for cultures.
... prophecy fiction has throughout its history represented the illusion of a monochrome culture. Its novels, after all, have most often been written by and for whit eAmerican men--and often with distinctly racist overtones. page 168
The changes in the genre introduce an irony Gribben mentions that may only make sense to Christian readers:
... Writing the Rapture is ultimately, therefore, a record of the ideological failure of the most significant product of the dispensational imagination. The evangelical imagination has entered the cultural mainstream, but that success has undermined the central tenets of dispensational cultural theory. The commercial success of prophecy fiction therefore argues for the failure of dispensational ideas. Hopes for the imminence of the rapture have been denied by the success of the fiction that sought to represent it. pages 169-170
As with the sparkling hope of global communist proletarian revolution so the Rapture, whole publishing empires and industries exist to promulgate an eschatological moment in apocalyptic terms that, should it ever actually arrive, vitiates all that effort on the one hand and, on the other, parallel centuries of literary toil have obviously failed to usher in.
Gribben's most damning observation, to me, is:
... Evangelicalism has historically been a movement that centered on the story of the Cross: this "crucicentrism" has even been identified as one of the movement's four distinctive features. But, in the vast majority of evangelical prophecy fictions, the Cross is obvious only by its absence. While the Cross is invoked in the novels' content, it is often undermined in the novels' form. Evangelical prophecy fictions offer increasingly dichotomous views of church-society relations and are increasingly pessimistic about the potential to rescue individuals from the fallen world. Unbelievers are there to be resisted, not served or saved: the Cross is no longer enough. page 170
In Gribben's reading, the Cross has been removed from evangelical End Times fiction. You could read dozens of books in the genre and never learn anything about what is regarded as the central mystery of the Christian faith. What you'll get, instead, are cloak and dagger tales about who's going to ruin America.
During what Alan Jacobs described as the golden age of the detective story, a period spanning roughly 1910 to 1940, End Times fiction was slowly taking shape and developing variations on a "mystery" that took the end to be a foregone conclusion and ginned up just a few variations on "how" the end was going to arrive, a kind of anti-detective genre that evolved alongside the justifiably more celebrated genre. You're probably much better off reading Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes than The Devil's Bride.
