This thesis uses principles from Burke's Rhetoric of Identification to examine how apocalyptic prophecies foster and maintain an apocalyptic group identity. Jehovah's Witnesses were used as a sample apocalyptic group because they comprise a group with a heavy textual and symbolic focus on the apocalypse.

The goal of this thesis was to analysis the Islamic State’s apocalyptic nature by studying both classic Islamic eschatology and the Islamic State’s online magazine Dabiq. In order to conduct this research, I separated my thesis into two separate angles of approach. The first angle (chapters one & two) exclusively looked at Islamic eschatology, classic apocalyptic texts, shifts in how literature was written over time, and on examples of modern messianic revolutions occurring. In this way, I attempted to emphasize how extra-Qur’anic texts have played a large part in providing details for what Islamic eschatology entails. I also looked at modern examples of messianic movements, including in Mecca and Sudan. I concluded by analyzing the shift modern apocalyptic literature underwent beginning in the late 20th century. This highlighted how apocalyptic literature stated focusing on the actions of Western forces—much like the Islamic State has done today. The second angle of approach derived from the final chapters. I looked at the foundation and development of the Islamic State beginning in the early 21st century with Al-Qaeda in Iraq. I proceeded to emphasize how messianic speculation influenced the actions and strategies of Islamic State in Iraq and later ISIS. The final chapter, the crux of my thesis, was an analysis of the Islamic State’s written primary source, Dabiq. I researched all thirteen issues of the magazine for evidence of apocalyptic nature existing.I highlighted how Dabiq is filled with apocalyptic references and classic apocalyptic hadiths. The objective of this thesis was to provide a multifaceted analysis of the Islamic State. It attempted to approach the Islamic State from two different angles to show why apocalyptic thought first arises, how it has led to revolution, and how the Islamic State mirrors those cases. With the Islamic State, a wide variety of interpretations have formed on what it wants and what it is fighting for. Whereas religious motivation has often been dismissed, I used this thesis to emphasize that both religious and apocalyptic motivation have been one of many influences behind the formation and development of the Islamic State.

This dissertation reveals a hitherto unrecognized thread of speculative postapocalyptic fantasies underlying nineteenth-century accounts of the American frontier. Many critics have exposed the latent imperialism behind popular myths of primeval wilderness and virgin land; bringing together fictional tales, travel writings, and scientific texts, I show that U.S. authors who enthusiastically celebrated these myths distorted rather than escaped the bounds of history. Their literature results in an uncanny historicism that unsettles narratives of material progress by conflating ancient territorial rupture with a potentially disastrous future. The Illinois prairie of the 1840s thus appeared to Margaret Fuller as a country that has been carefully cultivated by a civilized people, who had been suddenly removed from the earth, with all the works of their hands, and the land given again into nature's keeping. Fuller's notion of hidden destruction behind a vision of natural tranquility was not uncommon. Striving to reconcile their projection of an empty continent with the myriad traces of both Native Americans and prior European settlers, writers such as William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack London crafted historical narratives that imagined the swift annihilation of entire populations. For them, the blank slate of the American continent was simultaneously a ruined wasteland, and the mythical American Adam was really an American Noah - a patriarch of a new world built on the violent dissolution of the old. U.S. frontier literature between the War of 1812 and the First World War contains postapocalyptic themes like the last man on earth, the lapse into barbarism, and ruin-strewn landscapes. As a key example, I read Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) as a narrative of biological extinction that foreshadows his later national apocalyptic allegory The Crater (1847). Similarly, I contend that the industrial ruins a young Thoreau discovered in the Maine woods spurred him to imagine a suddenly depopulated Massachusetts in his journal. These postapocalyptic fantasies often attempted to deny the ongoing presence and property claims of Native Americans by relegating the original inhabitants of American soil to a separate past, yet they also suggested that the United States itself might be subject to imminent catastrophe.

This analysis of apocalyptic rhetoric brings nine generations of the written text of the Johannine Apocalypse into a contemporary (1989-1994) framework which includes phenomena such as self-determination, mutual interdependence and psychoterror. The discussion is mediated by disciplines and backgrounds of Religion and Literature. The critical method is religio-literary. Literary themes from the Johannine Apocalypse, especially themes of annihilation, torment, blessedness and rapture, structure the discussion. These themes are related to ideas of self-determination such as were proclaimed at the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights (UNWCHR), Vienna, 1993. The discussion questions the axioms of self determination, especially the matter of indivisibility which came to issue during UNWCHR, Vienna, 1993. Some policies and practices of the Australian government's human rights activities are discussed. Attention is then redirected to the Johannine Apocalypse as a polyvalent source of apocalyptic ideation and a source of social empowerment.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 379-401). Also available on the Internet.

This analysis of apocalyptic rhetoric brings nine generations of the written text of the Johannine Apocalypse into a contemporary (1989-1994) framework which includes phenomena such as self-determination, mutual interdependence and psychoterror. The discussion is mediated by disciplines and backgrounds of Religion and Literature. The critical method is religio-literary. Literary themes from the Johannine Apocalypse, especially themes of annihilation, torment, blessedness and rapture, structure the discussion. These themes are related to ideas of self-determination such as were proclaimed at the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights (UNWCHR), Vienna, 1993. The discussion questions the axioms of self determination, especially the matter of indivisibility which came to issue during UNWCHR, Vienna, 1993. Some policies and practices of the Australian government's human rights activities are discussed. Attention is then redirected to the Johannine Apocalypse as a polyvalent source of apocalyptic ideation and a source of social empowerment.

Univ., Diss.--Princeton. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 278-296) and indexes.

Thesis (MA(Bybel en Godsdienskunde)--Universiteit van Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-126)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 379-401). Also available on the Internet.

Parmi les nombreuses apocalypses composées durant l’Antiquité judéo-chrétienne, seules l’Apocalypse de Jean et l’Apocalypse de Paul (par l’intermédiaire de la Vision de saint Paul) ont bénéficié de traductions en ancien français. Leur réception textuelle fait l’objet dans ce travail d’un classement exhaustif et d’une étude détaillée. En raison de leur succès, ces deux apocalypses ont laissé une empreinte durable dans les mentalités médiévales, car elles répondaient à deux préoccupations majeures : le Jugement collectif (Apocalypse johannique) et le Jugement individuel (apocalypse paulinienne). Elles ont donné naissance à un imaginaire dont on peut déceler la trace dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge grâce à une approche intertextuelle. Plusieurs pans de la littérature médiévale recourent à cet imaginaire, qu’il s’agisse de la littérature visionnaire (avec La Vision de Tondale et Le Purgatoire de saint Patrick), de la littérature allégorique (dans La Tournoi de l’Antéchrist et Le Roman de la Rose) ou de la littérature didactique et religieuse (dans La Somme le roi, les sermons ou les épîtres farcies). L’imaginaire apocalyptique imprègne ainsi une part considérable de la littérature de cette époque, de telle sorte qu’on peut l’envisager comme un univers mental autonome, riche de motifs, de lieux, de créatures, et parfois d’inquiétudes. De texte en texte, cet imaginaire s’est propagé au gré de strates intertextuelles que la philologie est en mesure de distinguer. Mais ce réseau complexe d’interférences ne doit pas nous faire oublier que la réception de l’imaginaire apocalyptique ne s’appréhende pas uniquement à une échelle textuelle. Elle met aussi en jeu des mécanismes cognitifs comme la compréhension, la représentation ou l’imagination. / Among the numerous apocalypses written during the Judeo-Christian Antiquity, only the Revelation of John and the Apocalypse of Paul (through the Vision of Paul) got old french translations. In this work, their textual reception is the subject of a complete inventory and a detailed study. Because of their success, both left a durable trace in the medieval mindset, as they solved two major concerns : collective judgement (Johannine Apocalypse) and individual jugdement (paulinian apocalypse). They gave birth to an imaginary world which can be detected in medieval french literature thanks to an intertextual approach. Many parts of the medieval literature use this imagination : the visionary literature (in the Vision of Tondale and St Patrick’s Purgatory), the allegoric literature (in the Tournoi de l’Antéchrist and the Roman de la Rose) or the didactic and religious literature (in the Somme le roi, the homilies and the “épîtres farcies”). The apocalyptic imagination thus spreads through a considerable part of this literature, and therefore we can consider it as an independent world of the mind, full of motives, places, creatures, and sometimes fears. From a text to another, this imagination has disseminated according to intertextual levels which can be distinguished by philology. But this complex web of correlations must not make us forget that the reception of the apocalyptic imagination is not only accessible from a textual viewpoint. It also employs cognitive mechanisms like understanding, representation and imagination.