given the status of 'myth' and cause us to take unwarranted actions. Indeed, some people do approach apocalyptic fictions with a 'naive acceptance'. Others have a 'clerkly scepticism' and deny that it is possible to accurately predict the world's end date. Stories of the end also allow individuals to reflect on their own death, and to make sense of their lives, their place in time, and their relationship to the beginning and the end. This gives rise to Kermode's memorable phrase: 'No longer imminent, the end is immanent'. Having laid down this theoretical position, Kermode tracks the creation of new attempts to 'make sense of life' through literature. He focuses on modern literature but covers a range of authors including William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, the French 'new novelists', William S. Burroughs, Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 2000 it was reissued with a new epilogue. Kermode's later work also continues similar trains of thought. Reception On its publication, the book "caused considerable excitement among literary faculties in America". It is now considered important in the field of fiction theory. In a 1967 review of the book, The New York Times described it as "impressively learned, eloquent and brilliant". More recently The Daily Telegraph called it "magnificent", and Adam Phillips, in the London Review of Books, "one of the best books I had ever read". Several obituaries of Kermode took the same title, including those that appeared in The Daily Telegraph and the journal Common Knowledge. The book appears on numerous university reading lists and is still regularly commented upon at academic conferences and in other books on literature. Colin Burrow wrote in 2013 that he regarded it as one of "the three most inspiring works of literary criticism written in the twentieth century" together with Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and E. R. Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. References 1967 books Books of literary criticism Oxford University Press books