If imagination is understood to be a human response to the self-revelation of God, what practical results might this have for the work both of literary criticism and theology? In contrast to the freedom of the literary imagination, Christian doctrine seems to hedge meaning around with limits, distilling concepts from images, and summing up the loose ends of stories in one unified story. But the author sets out to show how image and story in poetry and novels can actually help the theologian to make doctrinal statements, while at the same time insights gained from theology can assist the critical reading of literature. Indeed, both theologians and creative writers find human existence to be characterized by an even more basic tension between freedom and limit, which accounts for a sense of "fallenness", and which a dialogue between literature and Christian doctrine can do much to illuminate. Such a dialogue is worked out in studies of the poetry of William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the novels of D.H.Lawrence, Iris Murdoch and William Golding.

This book brings Christian theology, creative literature and literary critical theory into dialogue on the theme of "the end." Where appropriate it also considers recent scientific views on the nature of time.

'Postmodern' critical theorists and many other writers emphasize the 'open' nature of endings, but this book suggests that the mixture of openness and closure in Christian eschatology not only offers a coherent sense of an ending, but may make it possible to construct endings in the here and now. On the way to this conclusion the book provides an exegesis of novels, plays and poems by such writers as John Fowles, Julian Barnes, Doris Lessing, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Shakespeare. Among critical theorists, postmodern and otherwise, it considers especially the ideas of Frank Kermode, Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur.

The author also examines the main themes of Christian eschatology - such as death, parousia, resurrection, human destiny and the nature of eternity - and offers a critical view of the doctrines of the last things produced by major modern theologians, including Jurgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Through this dialogue the book aims to form an image of the eternal 'wholeness' of persons in the life of the triune God that takes seriously the deconstruction of images of domination.