Valleys of the Shadow of Death: The Apocalypses of the Inferno and One Hundred Years of Solitude

The literary genre apocalypse is unknown or, at best, vague to literary scholarship. The genre apocalypse is an important category of religious and world literature. Apocalypses communicate diverse worldviews. They rationalize existence. They encourage audiences unto righteousness and warn audiences of sin. Their common forms and functions achieve their distinctive, visionary, revelatory quality and exhortative force. These forms and functions constitute the genre apocalypses' definition, and differentiate apocalypses from other works. Dante's Inferno and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude are both apocalypses, though they are not normally considered such. Each work manifests an apocalypse's typical form and function. Each presents a unique vision of reality. Each exhorts consistently with it vision, aims its exhortation at its unique audience and era, and achieves all this through typically apocalyptic motifs like those seen in Revelation. Inferno and Solitude's apocalypticism reveals their meaning and explains their cultural effect.

Name thesis:degree_name

MA

Level thesis:degree_level

Immediate Access

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2010

Author dc:creator

• Assenza, Deirdre Ann

Contributors dc:contributor

• Bernard Beranek
• Anne Brannen

• apocalypse
• inferno
• prophecy
• revelation
• solitude

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/264

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dsc.duq.edu:etd-1268