Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
3rd T-LitCon: Discursive Terminals: Representations of the Apocalypse in Literature, İstanbul, Türkiye, 20 - 21 Aralık 2025, ss.36, (Özet Bildiri)
Julian Rathbone’s The Last English King transforms the Norman Conquest of 1066 from a historical episode into a symbolic apocalypse, the annihilation of Anglo- Saxon England, and the traumatic birth of a new, hybrid identity. This paper reads the novel through Jeffrey C. Alexander’s Cultural Trauma Theory, which defines trauma as a collective experience that leaves “indelible marks upon group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways,” forcing a community to reconstruct itssense of self. Rathbone’s narrator, Walt, is rendered as “the last Englishman” and functions asthe bearer of thistrauma: a survivor who witnessesthe death of Anglo-Saxon England and transforms that loss into narrative memory. His wandering through the desolate post-conquest landscape transforms him into the figure who bears witness to the annihilation of a cultural order. His retrospective account turns historical defeat into a symbolic end-of-the-world, where the landscape, language, and moral order of a people collapse under Norman domination. Walt's utilization contributes to the apocalyptic tone as he is characterized as a huscarl, which requires him to die alongside his lord by fighting until the end, therefore, failing to do so is portrayed as the cause of his grief. By voicing this grief and remembrance, Walt assumes the role of Alexander’s “carrier group,” transmitting the trauma of a vanished culture to later generations. The novel’s apocalyptic tone, haunted by loss, irony, and moral disillusionment, thus articulates not divine revelation but cultural devastation, a process through which Englishness is both annihilated and reconstituted. The apocalypse, in this reading, becomes a mode of historical cognition: it names the moment when a society recognizes its own extinction and beginsto narrate itself anew. Rathbone’stext ultimately exposes how the myth of English continuity is founded upon rupture, rendering the Conquest as both the end and the traumatic origin of what would later be called England.