Springlore in Virginia

Excerpts from the Introduction: America has long been the source and focus of a powerful apocalyptic vision, at first millennial but becoming by our century unmistakably cataclysmic in nature. At the earliest intimations of a vast land beyond the circumscribed orbis terrarium of the fifteenth century, Europe endowed America with its millennial hopes. Columbus, reaching the coast of South America, quoted passages from Revelation and Isaiah which tell of "a new heaven and a new earth," and he wrote to his royal patrons, "I deeply feel within me that there, where I have said, lies the Terrestrial Paradise." Because each of the following essays is concerned with the nature of apocalypse, each author will develop a definition of the word according to the usage of his or her discipline: there will, of course, be both convergences and divergences among the various definitions and disciplines. Furthermore, the essays tend to be broad in their focus rather than narrow, because our concern is the influence of the myth of apocalypse during the entire course of America's history rather than just during our own times and its influence, furthermore, on many cultural levels.