445. Longenbach, J. "Matthew Arnold and the Modern Apocalypse." PMLA 104 (5), 1989: 844-55.
A review of modern and post-modern literary apocalypses, noting that each new literary fashion finds its own world and times an ultimate abyss, tending surely towards apocalypse. Arnold is the prototype of all such prophecies since, albeit indirectly via such writers as Yeats and Eliot. All these metaphors commit the "anthropomorphic error," projecting our own unease onto the world at large. If we are without belief or a sense of the ultimate, the world must be going to hell. These are all figures of speech pretending to be ultimate truth. There is, as Frost has pointed out, a perverse schadenfreude in such beliefs, but this rhetoric can and does obscure our own history.
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