The Last Man

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Keyword(s):  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Last Man ◽  
The Last Man

The last man! I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.’ Mary Shelley, Journal (May 1824). Best remembered as the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man eight years later, on returning to England from Italy after her husband’s death. It is the twenty-first century, and England is a republic governed by a ruling elite, one of whom, Adrian, Earl of Windsor, has introduced a Cumbrian boy to the circle. This outsider, Lionel Verney, narrates the story, a tale of complicated, tragic love, and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague. The Last Man also functions as an intriguing roman à clef, for the saintly Adrian is a monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friend Lord Raymond is a portrait of Byron. The novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, as Shelley demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem her doomed characters.

scholarly journals The Last Man and ‘The First Woman’: Unmanly Images of Unhuman Nature in Mary Shelley’s Ecocriticism

Perichoresis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
Éva Antal
Keyword(s):  
Mary Shelley ◽  
The Other ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Last Man ◽  
The One ◽  
The Last Man

AbstractMary Shelley in her writings relies on the romanticised notions of nature: in addition to its beauties, the sublime quality is highlighted in its overwhelming greatness. In her ecological fiction, The Last Man (1826), the dystopian view of man results in the presentation of the declining civilization and the catastrophic destruction of infested mankind. In the novel, all of the characters are associated with forces of culture and history. On the one hand, Mary Shelley, focussing on different human bonds, warns against the sickening discord and dissonance, the lack of harmony in the world, while, on the other hand, she calls for the respect of nature and natural order. The prophetic caring female characters ‘foresee’ the events but cannot help the beloved men to control their building and destroying powers. Mary Shelley expresses her unmanly view of nature and the author’s utopian hope seems to lie in ‘unhuman’ nature. While the epidemic, having been unleashed by the pests of patriarchal society and being accelerated by global warming, sweeps away humanity, Mother Nature flourishes and gains back her original ‘dwelling place’.

The Future of the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Boxall ◽  
Bryan Cheyette
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Push And Pull ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter addresses the future of the novel. It also reflects on the possibility and nature of historical change. The push and pull between the novel as an expressive symptom of an ailing culture, and the novel as the engine for the production of new cultural possibilities, runs through the long history of novelists’ reflections on the future of the novel. From our perspective in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the perception of a watershed triggered by 1973, and a new understanding of the relationship between style, fiction, and knowledge, seems remarkably prescient. Moreover, the new generation of novelists that have emerged since the turn of the century have collectively registered the re-emergence of a kind of historical vitality in the culture.

scholarly journals Predicting the Patriarchal Politics of Pandemics From Mary Shelley to COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Hunt Botting
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Last Man

I examine the predictive powers of the political science fictions of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood for understanding the patriarchal—or men-dominant—dynamics of the politics of pandemics in the twenty-first century. Like her literary followers in post-apocalyptic plague literature, Butler and Atwood, Shelley foresaw that the twenty-first century would be the age of lethal pandemics. Their post-apocalyptic fictions also projected the ways that patriarchal and authoritarian forms of populism could shape the cultural circumstances that can turn a local outbreak of a new and deadly contagious disease, like COVID-19, into a politically chaotic and economically devastating global plague. Modern feminist political science fiction born of Shelley's great pandemic novel The Last Man (1826) is seemingly clairvoyant not because of any supernatural powers of the authors but rather because of their studied attention to the wisdom of plague literature, the lessons of epidemic history, and the political dynamics of patriarchy and populism.

Pietro Basso,Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Livesin the Twenty-first Century. London: Verso, 2003. pp. 275. $27.00 cloth.

2005 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 134-136
Author(s):  
Gerd-Rainer Horn
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Working Time ◽  
First Century ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century

For some time now, sociologists, economists and assorted futurologists have flooded the pages of learned journals and the shelves of libraries with analyses of the continuing decline of industrial and other forms of labor. In proportion to the decline of working time, those social scientists proclaim, the forward march of leisure has become an irresistible trend of the most recent past, the present and, most definitely, the future. Those of us living on planet earth have on occasion wondered about the veracity of such claims which, quite often, appear to stand in flat contradiction to our experiences in everyday life. The work of the Italian sociologist Pietro Basso is thus long overdue and proves to be a welcome refutation of this genre of, to paraphrase Basso, obfuscating hallucinations.

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