Oxford World's Classics The Last Man 最後的人類

“The disaster of a pandemic would be driven by politics and spiraling health crisis would be caused by what people and their leaders had done and failed to do on the international stage—in trade, war, and the interpersonal bargains, pacts, and conflicts that precede them.” — Eileen Hunt Botting, University of Notre Dame

 

The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, first published in 1826. The narrative concerns Europe in the late 21st century, ravaged by the rise of a bubonic plague pandemic that rapidly sweeps across the entire globe, ultimately resulting in the near-extinction of humanity. With intriguing portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism and demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem the doomed characters.

 

The first of the three is a tedious late-Georgian, Godwinian romance where the upper classes are genetically superior, and the biggest sign of science fiction is that tensions between royalists, anti-royal aristocrats, and parliamentarians threaten to repeat the English Civil War of the 17th century. Things pick up in the second volume, where the author anticipates the Greco-Turkish wars, modelled on the Greek War of Independence, where Byron died. Bayonets are duly fixed, but more importantly, Shelley invents the secular apocalypse in stunning form in the last volume of the novel.

 

While the plague in The Last Man might be metaphorical – the end of an empire, the Romantic traditions and humanism – the novel contains much scientific exactitude concerning the development of the smallpox vaccine and 19th-century theories about the nature of contagion. Concluding with the picture of Earth’s solitary inhabitant, Shelley infers that the condition of the individual is essentially isolated and tragic. A feeling of awe, a breathless sentiment of wonder, a painful sense of the degradation of humanity, was introduced into every heart. Yet nature, our mother and our friend, had turned on us a brow of menace. 

 

She shewed us plainly that, though she permitted us to assign her laws and subdue her apparent powers, yet, if she put forth but a finger, we must quake. She could take the ball in her hand and cast it into space, where life would be drunk up, and man and all his efforts forever annihilated. In a sense, the plague is metaphorical, since the revolutionary idyll of the élite group is corroded from within by flaws of human nature. As literary scholar Kari Lokke writes, "in its refusal to place humanity at the center of the universe, its questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature, then, The Last Man constitutes a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism." 

 

Specifically, Mary Shelley, in making references to the failure of the French Revolution and the Godwinian, Wollstonecraftian, and Burkean responses to it, "attacks Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress through collective efforts". A futuristic story of tragic love and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague, The Last Man is Mary Shelley's most important novel after Frankenstein. 

 

Features

• Edition : -
• Binding : Paperback
• ISBN : 9780199552351
• Publication Date : 2008/10/15

 

Materials & Care

• Imported