Historical fiction ---> Prophetic fiction?

Crawford Gribben's Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America (OUP, 2009) is outside my usual frame of reference--it starts in the early twentieth century, to begin with--but the project shares many of the questions and logistical problems that affect my own work.  Texts far, far off the critical beaten path (not a single canonical text to be found); problems with tracking production and reception; authors with no available biographical data to speak of; disparities between theological orthodoxy, of whatever sort, and its literary incarnations.  However, what most interested me about the book was the missing link, as it were, between my end of things and Gribben's: to what extent did prophecy fiction emerge from the seeds of the Victorian controversial novel? Although Gribben points to the "eschatalogical themes" (30) in writers ranging from Charles Brocken Brown to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, I'd suggest that, paradoxically enough, one of the most fruitful places to look for the antecedents of prophecy fiction is...evangelical historical fiction.  (And no, that's not just because I spend a lot of time writing about historical fiction.)  The logic of the evangelical historical novel, especially in its anti-Catholic manifestations, is frequently something like this:

X happened ---> we have forgotten that X happened ---> therefore, X will happen again in the future

Thus, the point of writing about, say, anything from St. Augustine of Canterbury's mission to England in 597 to the English Civil War is to remind readers that any compromise with Rome will predictably cause a series of thoroughly unfortunate events--and, contrariwise, that righteous resistance to Rome will lead to godly results.   Historical events differ; the real history, the ongoing battle between God's church and Antichrist, plays out behind and through those events.  The novels invite readers to look back in order to look forward.   Gribben's prophetic novels take this strategy a couple of logical steps further: representing the End itself, the outcome of whatever cluster of religious, political, or cultural failures is most popular at the time.