The Last Man

Allen, Graham

doi:10.1007/978-1-137-09659-3_5

Cited by 1 publication

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References 11 publications

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“…113 That same year, he might have acquired from his publishers their new dual release of the first American edition of The Last Man with Frankenstein. 114 As with Poe, we also do not know for certain if Orwell read Shelley's novels. But we do know that Orwell praised the 'lost art' of her journalsthe basis of her roman à clef, The Last Manin 1944, and that the original title for Nineteen Eighty-Four was 'The Last Man in Europe'.…”

Section: Shelley's Post-apocalyptic Legacies For Existentialism Dysto...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mary Shelley'sThe Last Man: Existentialism and IR meet the post-apocalyptic pandemic novel

Botting

2022

Rev. Int. Stud.

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Mary Shelley mined the ideas of international thought to help develop three new subgenres of modern political science fiction (‘poliscifi’): post-apocalyptic, existential, and dystopian. Her two great works of poliscifi, Frankenstein (1818), and The Last Man (1826) – confront the social problems that arise from humanity's technological and cultural interventions in the wider environment. This article recovers The Last Man not only as the first modern post-apocalyptic pandemic novel, but also as an important source for the existentialist tradition, dystopian literature, and their intersections with what I call ‘Literary IR’. Comparing The Last Man with its probable sources and influences – from Thucydides and Vattel to Orwell and Camus – reveals Shelley's ethical and political concerns with the overlapping problems of interpersonal and international conflict. The Last Man dramatises how interpersonal conflict, if left unchecked, can spiral into the wider sociopolitical injustices of violence, war, and other human-made disasters such as species extinction, pandemics, and more metaphorical ‘existential’ plagues like loneliness and despair. Despite these dark themes and legacies, Shelley's authorship of the great plague novel of the nineteenth century also inspired a truly hopeful post-apocalyptic existential response to crisis and conflict in feminist poliscifi by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Emily St. John Mandel.

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Section: Shelley's Post-apocalyptic Legacies For Existentialism Dysto...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mary Shelley'sThe Last Man: Existentialism and IR meet the post-apocalyptic pandemic novel

Botting

2022

Rev. Int. Stud.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

The Last Man

Cited by 1 publication

References 11 publications

Mary Shelley'sThe Last Man: Existentialism and IR meet the post-apocalyptic pandemic novel

Mary Shelley'sThe Last Man: Existentialism and IR meet the post-apocalyptic pandemic novel

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