The Last Man - Softcover

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

3.37

5,736 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803292171 ISBN 13: 9780803292178

Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr, 1993

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The Last Man ends in 2100, "the last year of the world." A devastating plague has wiped out humanity, except for one man. This novel of horror, originally published in 1826, was rejected in its time and out of print from 1833 to 1963, when the first Bison Books edition appeared. Some critics now rate The Last Man more highly than Frankenstein, by the same author. This Bison Books edition offers a new introduction by Anne K. Mellor, who writes, "In our era of AIDS and biological warfare, Shelley's apocalyptic vision of an incurable plague that gradually destroys the entire human species resonates with mythic power."

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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:

Anne K. Mellor, a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters.

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