The Last Man: Prompts and Sources

Prompts

What is role of allusion in the novel (Greek, Biblical, Shakespearean, etc.)?

What role does a specific historical event play in shaping the novel (French Revolution, Greek War of Independence, Napoleonic wars, the Black Death, etc.)?

What role does race play in the novel?

What are the gender dynamics in the novel? To what extent are stereotypes of masculinity or femininity critiqued or reinforced?

What are the politics of sexuality in the novel? Do you read homosexual/homosocial desire in the relationships between characters in the novel?

What role do animals play in the novel?

Do you see this novel as (proto-)environmentalist? What is its depiction of “nature” as an idea and/or a lived environment?

Do you see this novel as an early work of speculative climate fiction? What parallels exist between the contemporary climate crisis and the novel? How does the novel imagine the effects of a climate crisis on politics, immigration/refugees, economics/class, etc.?

What is the novel’s concept of place or nationality?

How does the novel depict plague and the related issues of disease, contagion, illness, death and/or burial?

Sources

An, Young-Ok. “Read Your Fall”: The Signs of Plague in “The Last Man.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 44, no. 4, Winter, 2005, pp. 581-604.

Bailes, Melissa. “The Psychologization of Geological Catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” ELH: English Literary History 82, no. 2, June 2015, pp. 671–99.

Cameron, Lauren. “Mary Shelley’s Malthusian Objections in The Last Man,” Nineteenth Century Literature 67, no. 2, Sept. 2012, pp. 177–203.

Cantor, Paul A. “The Apocalypse of Empire: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley After Frankenstein, edited by Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank and Gregory O’Dea, Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997, pp. 193-211.

Chatterjee, Ranita. “Our Bodies, Our Catastrophes: Biopolitics in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” European Romantic Review, vol. 25, no. 1, 2014, pp. 35-49.

Cove, Patricia. “‘The Earth’s Deep Entrails’: Gothic Landscapes and Grotesque Bodies in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” Gothic Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, November 2013, pp. 19-36.

Fisch, Audrey. “Plauging Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction and The Last Man.” The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, edited by Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, Oxford University Press, 1993 pp. 267-86.

Hutchings, Kevin. “‘A Dark Image in a Phantasmagoria’: Pastoral Idealism, Prophecy, andMateriality in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” Romanticism 10, no. 2, 2004, pp. 228–44.

Johnson, Barbara. “The Last Man.” The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, edited by Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 258-86.

McWhir, Anne. “Mary Shelley’s Anti-Contagionism: The Last Man as Fatal Narrative.” Mosaic:An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 35, no. 2, June 2002, pp. 23-38.

Melville, Peter. “The Problem of Immunity in The Last Man.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 47, no. 4, Autumn 2007, pp. 825-846.

Paley, Morton D. “The Last Man: Apocalypse without Millennium,” The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, edited by Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 107–23.

Vine, Steve. “Mary Shelley’s Sublime Bodies: Frankenstein, Matilda, The Last Man.” English: Journal of the English Association, vol. 55, no. 212, 1 July 2006, pp. 141–156.

Wagner-Lawler, Jennifer. “Performing History, Performing Humanity in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol.42, no. 4, 2002, pp. 753-780.

Wang, Fuson. “We Must Live Elsewhere: The Social Construction of Natural Immunity in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” European Romantic Review, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 235-55.