The Last Man (World's Classics) - Softcover

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192831526 ISBN 13: 9780192831521

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1994

Synopsis

A futuristic story of tragic love and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague. With portraits of Percy Shelley and Byron, it expresses a reaction against their brand of Romanticism by demonstrating the failure of art and imagination to save the human race.

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:

Daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley edited the works of her husband, Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and is best known as the author of Frankenstein.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0192831526
• ISBN 13: 9780192831521
• Binding: Paperback