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    The Last Man

    £24.26
    £26.95
    Price-Match is available in-store for recommended titles in CCCU module handbooks
    ISBN: 9781551110769
    Products specifications
    Attribute nameAttribute value
    AuthorShelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
    Pub Date30/09/1996
    BindingPaperback
    Pages425
    Publisher: BROADVIEW PRESS
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    A novel, first published in 1826, set in the 21st century, when England is a republic governed by a ruling elite. The narrator, an outsider introduced to the circle, tells a story of tragic, complicated love, and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague.

    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.