The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination

This erudite study by Hunt (Artificial Life After Frankenstein), a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, examines plague motifs in the writings of 19th-century English novelist Mary Shelley. Examining Shelley’s 1826 dystopian novel, The Last Man, Hunt argues that the story, which follows the solitary human survivor of a pandemic that originated in the squalid conditions created by Greece’s wartime siege of Constantinople in 2092, dramatizes the “unjust social consequences associated with the repeated human failure to make peace, share love, and care for others.” Plagues feature literally and “as a metaphor for disaster” in Shelley’s journals, according to Hunt, who notes that three of the novelist’s children died from premature birth, dysentery, and malaria between 1815 and 1819, followed by husband Percy Bysshe Shelley in an 1822 sailing accident. The tragedies led Shelley to compare herself in letters and diaries to Oedipus Rex, whom she viewed as a “human pollutant” who brought calamity to those around him. The sharp analysis sheds welcome light on lesser studied corners of Shelley’s oeuvre, and Hunt’s meditation on the final scene of The Last Man provides a stirring take on enduring in the face of calamity: “We should always act upon hope for retaining what makes us loving, humane, and connected to others, even in the face of total catastrophe.” English literature scholars will consider this well worth their time. Photos. (Apr.)