By Mary Shelley
ISBN-10: 0486118398
ISBN-13: 9780486118390
From the writer of Frankenstein comes this apocalyptic story of an international devastated by way of plague. Mary Shelley's 1826 roman à clef happens within the overdue twenty-first century, as England's final king abdicates and a charmed circle of idealistic political reformers plunges right into a maelstrom of conflict, pestilence, and anarchy.
Shelley wrote this gripping novel after the premature deaths of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their comrade, Lord Byron. She modeled a couple of characters at the charismatic poets and dependent the narrator—the sole survivor of a pandemic—on her personal character. This parable of humanity's destruction via plague is commonly considered as a repudiation of Romanticism and its failure to resolve the world's difficulties via artwork and philosophy. It displays the methods utopian beliefs, unchecked by means of ethical and moral criteria, can shatter society.
Misunderstood via nineteenth-century readers, Shelley's visionary novel disappeared for over a century, in simple terms to reemerge to severe acclaim as a precursor of technology fiction and a forerunner of recent apocalyptic stories. Novelist Muriel Spark hailed it because the harbinger of "an completely new style, compounded of the household romance, the Gothic extravaganza, and the sociological novel," and reported it Shelley's "most attention-grabbing, if no longer her consummate work."
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Extra info for The Last Man
Sample text
And at that time the pale, worn, patient face was seen looking up at the sky, with the broken right hand lying bare on the outside of the covering garments, as if waiting to be taken by another hand. They gave him drink, moistened his face with water, and administered some drops of cordials and wine. ’’ (Hard Times, p. 206) Benjamin similarly locates his isolated novel reader ‘‘under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p.
Yet the definition of literacy was simultaneously restrictive enough that many or most working-class English people would never be able to count as fully literate: to speak with a regional accent, for example, or to use one’s education for radical ends, potentially labeled one as illiterate. The figure of the speaking worker marked, then, a point where two competing or contradictory concepts of literacy collided. An illiterate worker’s speech offered the promise of future education, the possibility of improvement, and even the liberal utopia of a fully educated, middle-class England.
In a manner that has since become familiar, Carlyle’s valorization of a hitherto occulted and suppressed speech permits a fantasy of a sovereign language that must be obeyed: ‘‘The world has to obey him who thinks and sees in the world . . It, the new Truth, new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the nature of a message from on high; and must and will have itself obeyed’’ (On Heroes, pp. 165–6). Such sovereign language heals the community, induces unanimity, and restores the damaged individual body to wholeness.
The Last Man by Mary Shelley
by Christopher
4.5