Imagining the End provides students and general readers with contextualized examples of how the apocalypse has been imagined across all mediums of American popular culture. Detailed entries analyze the development, influence, and enjoyment of end-times narratives. Imagining the End provides a contextual overview and individual description and analysis of the wide range of depictions of the end of the world that have appeared in American popular culture. American writers, filmmakers, television producers, and game developers inundated the culture with hundreds of imagined apocalyptic scenarios, influenced by the Biblical Book of Revelation, the advent of the end of the second millennium (2000 CE), or predictions of catastrophic events such as nuclear war, climate change, and the spread of AIDS. From being "raptured" to surviving the zombie apocalypse, readers and viewers have been left with an almost endless sequence of disasters to experience. Imagining the End examines this phenomenon and provides a context for understanding, and perhaps appreciating, the end of the world. This title is composed of alphabetized entries covering all topics related to the end times, covering popular culture mediums such as comic books, literature, films, and music.

Wherever vampires existed in the imaginations of different peoples, they adapted themselves to the customs of the local culture. As a result, vampire lore is extremely diverse. So too, representations of the vampire in creative works have been marked by much originality. In "The Vampyre" (1819), John Polidori introduced Lord Ruthven and established the vampire craze of the 19th century that resulted in a flood of German vampire poetry, French vampire drama, and British vampire fiction. This tradition culminated in Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (1897), which fixed the character of the Transylvanian nobleman as the archetypal vampire firmly in the public imagination. Numerous films drew from Stoker's novel to varying degrees, with each emphasizing different elements of his vampire character. And more recent writers have created works in which vampirism is used to explore contemporary social concerns.

The contributors to this volume discuss representations of the vampire in fiction, folklore, film, and popular culture. The first section includes chapters on Stoker and his works, with attention to such figures as Oscar Wilde and Edvard Munch. The second section explores the vampire in film and popular culture from Bela Lugosi to "Blacula." The volume then looks at such modern writers as Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro who have adapted the vampire legend to meet their artistic needs. A final section studies contemporary issues, such as vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS in ""Killing Zoe."

One hundred years after his creation by Bram Stoker, Dracula is still fascinating us. This study traces the changing nature of film representations of Dracula, from the early silent adaptations to recent popular dramas. Holte suggests that vampire films and Dracula adaptations have become an independent genre, the dark romance, with its own set of narrative conventions and audience expectations combining horror and eroticism. This engaging study provides readers with a natural history of the vampire, an examination of the work of Bram Stoker, a history and analysis of many film adaptations of Dracula, a survey of contemporary criticism and theory, and an extensive annotated bibliography of vampire film, fiction, and criticism.

From the early narratives of such colonial writers as Jonathan Edwards to the more recent conversion experiences of Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson, America is rich in both conversions and autobiographies. This volume provides a sourcebook for the study of American religious conversion narratives. It includes entries providing biographical, bibliographic, and critical commentary on thirty significant writers of conversion narratives. The subjects include writers of early colonial America, such as Mary Rowlandson and John Woolman, nineteenth-century women writers, such as Carry Nation and Ann Eliza Young, and writers from the twentieth-century social gospel movement, such as John Cogley and Dorothy Day. Chapters on subjects such as Jim Bakker give insight into the rise of televangelism. Finally, chapters on such writers as Frederick Douglass, Eldridge Cleaver, and Piri Thomas cover the conversion experiences of those who lived outside mainstream American culture.

The chapters are arranged alphabetically. Each one is divided into sections providing a short biography, discussing the narrative, covering criticism of the narrative, and a bibliography. The work concludes with a bibliographic essay and a full subject index.

From colonial times to the present, traveler and immigrant writers have seen America with new eyes. They have perceived and recorded the American experience as few native-born writers could do, yet their lives and words have often been left out of traditional American studies. This book provides an overview of ethnic-American personal writing with descriptive studies of more than twenty-five major autobiographies. In addition to providing biographical information about the writers, and bibliographical data about their tests, the volume presents both descriptions and analyses of the selected narratives.