Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America by Crawford Gribben (Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Print Culture, Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Print Culture, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
In this book, Crawford Gribben offers the only full-length history, description, and analysis of the rapture-novel genre. The late 1980s, which saw a renaissance of the evangelical imagination, culminated in the creation of the Left Behind series, co-authored by Tim La Haye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The novels in this series, Gribben shows, are astonishingly derivative - borrowing entire characters and significant incidents from earlier books. Analyzing the unexpected publishing success of the Left Behind novels, he characterizes the series as a barometer of evangelical popular opinion.