The Last Animal: Cosmopolitanism inThe Last Man

Abstract

This essay reads Mary Shelley's apocalyptic novel, The Last Man, as a case study in two varieties of Romantic cosmopolitanism: the progressivist (associated with historical perfectibility and a federated Europe) and the Cynic (associated with animal life and radical freedom). It suggests that progressivist cosmopolitanism characterizes the novel's depiction of political improvement at home and abroad, while Cynic cosmopolitanism shapes its treatment of life once states and their populations have disappeared. Not only does Cynic cosmopolitanism offer a way to understand the novel's focus on animal life as Verney becomes the last man, but it also holds potential for discussions of Romantic cosmopolitanism more generally. Because Cynic cosmopolitanism is compatible with political pessimism and contests state-based communities and forms of belonging, it challenges the assumption that cosmopolitanism is affirmative and collective. As such, it opens new avenues of inquiry into Romantic cosmopolitanism that uncouple cosmopolitanism from narratives of progress and improvement and highlight instead the importance of the cosmopolitan as critic. Cosmopolitanism can encompass such a range of stances and behaviors, and is associated with so many different intellectual traditions, as well as social and political agendas, that any discussion of it must specify it further.2 The imperative to think more carefully about the different varieties of cosmopolitanism comes out of recent work on Enlightenment and Romantic cosmopolitanism as well as the so-called new cosmopolitan thought, now nearly two decades old. 3 In part, it is motivated by the need to describe the full range of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism in finer detail, and to account for the interactions between older and newer varieties of cosmopolitanism more carefully. In part, it is a product of considering how certain topics central to our understanding of the Romantic era, notably nationalism and imperialism, interact with cosmopolitanism and nuance what Romantic cosmopolitanism can be taken to mean. 4 The very term Romantic cosmopolitanism, in its singularity and apparent neatness, belies its multiplicity: it spans topics including travel, exile,