Although most of Catholic Christendom escaped conquest by the Mongols, the West yields a comparatively broad and varied range of sources concerning the invaders and their empire. These include not only contemporary accounts of the onslaught of 1241–1242 on Hungary, but also narratives composed by Westerners who visited the Mongol world; geographical surveys, like Marco Polo’s description of Yuan China, reflecting the West’s considerably extended horizons; mercantile handbooks; and documents relating to trade with the Mongols. Admittedly, the earliest material is often characterized by apocalyptic speculation and misleading preconceptions. But at the opposite extreme, despite retaining some detail of a fantastic nature, the reports of members of the newly founded mendicant orders – the Franciscans and Dominicans – who traveled in Mongol Asia as either envoys or missionaries are unmatched for keen observation and penetrating analysis; they form an indispensable accessory and backcloth to the narrative accounts produced within non-European societies.

The Sibylline Oracles, Greek hexameters blending history, eschatological prophecy, and moral advice for various nations, are ascribed to the pagan prophetess Sibyl but were in fact composed and updated by Jews and then Christians from the second century BCE onwards. Many oracles feature an explicitly anti-Roman tone. Considering modern labels for the collection, from ‘missionary’ to ‘apocalyptic’ literature, this chapter evaluates a range of reasons to consider the growth of the corpus as an example of resistance to Roman rule, bearing in mind how (subtly) ‘resistance literature’ is usually said to operate. First, both the ascription of the oracles to the Sibyl, so appropriating what had become a Roman tool of power and knowledge, and the use of archaic Greek hexameters may be considered forms of ‘compositional resistance’ whereby authoritative genres are inverted. The Sibyllists’ wish to control forms of language and knowledge dominant in their society may also be deduced through close analysis of their language and styles. Our examination then moves to the level of content or theme (‘contextual resistance’), subdivided into the characteristically Sibylline topics of schematised history, eschatological anticipation about Nero, and forms of recommended behaviour. It is shown that biblical and Roman models are invoked and turned against Rome.

Aligning theories of objecthood and poetic sound, this essay analyzes three important writers of the current American South – Natasha Trethewey, Adam Vines, and Cormac McCarthy – whose lyric renderings speak to undeadness on integrated planes. Undeadness reveals what is distinct about poetry through a formal reading of sound as an undead force, if we understand poetic rhythm as a disembodied presence that evokes the unnamable space between words and sounds. Further, these writers’ striking motifs of deathliness provide a reference frame for translating the otherwise undefined field of poetic rhythm. Finally, the ethos of the undead is attached to the father figure, who takes on mythic strains, existing in a state of undeath. The father’s lasting presence carries on most powerfully in his child repeating, while revising, the rituals of his labor. Per this vision of undeadness, the value of generative work bears us beyond irruptive pasts, damaged and damaging environs, and compensatory narratives.

Recovering from the Civil War and facing the closing of the Western frontier, fin de siècle American society could be characterized as postapocalyptic. Americans were beginning to grapple with a geographically united but culturally divided country. Rural versus urban divisions, color lines, class lines, and gender conflict stratified everyday life. Religion, while still important, no longer provided social coherence because of the growing diversity of faiths. Apocalyptic form offered predominantly secular ways of engaging these conflicts, dramatizing resistance to violence and dehumanization while revealing the racist and classist ideologies underlying social demarcations, making it harder to ignore “how the other half lives.” Works such as Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives addressed past and current cataclysms while still providing hope for a transformed future. Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, however, critiqued the “savage” class system of fin de siècle American society, offering harsh judgement without revelation. With the United States’s entry into World War I, apocalyptic rhetoric shifted from an isolationist focus on internal divisions to an awareness of external dangers to the nation.