The Last Man - Softcover

Shelley, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1502339234 ISBN 13: 9781502339232

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

Synopsis

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm in the Bay of La Spezia. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, probably caused by the brain tumour that was to kill her at the age of 53. Shelley’s other writings have grabbed more attention in the last 50 years, but she is still known around the world today for Frankenstein. Shelley had traveled the region in which the story takes place, and the topics of the occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions. The actual storyline came from one of Shelley’s dreams, about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he created.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Mary Shelley’s third published novel, The Last Man, is a disillusioned vision of the end of civilization, set in the twenty-first century. The book offers a sweeping account of war, plague, love, and desolation. It is the sort of apocalyptic vision that was widespread at the time, though Shelley’s treatment of the theme goes beyond the conventional; it is extraordinarily interesting and deeply moving.

If The Last Man is in some sense a “conventional” text of the period, it is also intensely personal in its origin; Shelley refers in her journal to the last man as her alter ego, “the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.” The novel thus develops out of and contributes to a network of story and idea in which fantasy, allusion, convention, and autobiography are densely interwoven.

This new version of the first edition (1826) sets out to provide not only a thoroughly annotated text, but also contextual materials to help the reader acquire knowledge of the intellectual and literary milieu out of which the novel emerged. Appendices include material on “the last man” as early nineteenth-century hero, texts from the debate initiated by Malthus in 1798 about the adequacy of food supply to sustain human population, various accounts of outbreaks of plague, and Shelley’s poems representing her feelings after the death of her husband.

About the Author:

Mary Shelley was born the child of two of the most famous free - thinking intellectuals then living, and she eloped with one of the greatest poets of the age. She wrote her great novel, 'Frankenstein', about human monstrosity as part of a contest between friends during a trip to Switzerland in 1814, at a time when she was consistently either pregnant, nursing, or mourning a dead child, and also struggling with her husband's debt and pursuit of sexual relationships with other women.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1502339234
• ISBN 13: 9781502339232
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 226