The Last Man (Broadview Literary Texts) - Softcover

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551110768 ISBN 13: 9781551110769

Publisher: Broadview Press, 1996

Synopsis

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. The Last Man reverberates particularly strongly for the late twentieth-century reader, not only because of its millennial overtones but also because of its parallels between the plague that Shelley depicts and the AIDS epidemic of our own time. Overall, it is a novel that rivals Frankenstein in the rich profusion of ideas it gives rise to in the reader.

About this title

Product Description:

1st Broadview Press 1996 trade edition paperback fine book In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Review:

"Anne McWhir's edition of The Last Man is first rate! Mary Shelley's novel is well served by a careful editor who provides an informed introduction, comprehensive annotations, and well-chosen appendices that contextualize this richly complex novel--Shelley herself would have been pleased!" -- Charles E. Robinson, University of Delaware

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1551110768
• ISBN 13: 9781551110769
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480
• Editor: Anne McWhir