The Last Human - Classic Women

The Last Man - Classic Women Book Description The field of Gothic literature is a genre in which women writers excel. Some critics attribute this phenomenon to the fact that female writers are affected by the pressure, harassment and cruelty they face from their fathers, lovers and husbands in their private lives. Mary Shelley, with her novel The Last Man, published in 1826, became the first modern example of the apocalyptic novel, a sub-genre of science fiction specific to gothic literature, and became the leading author of this genre. Apocalyptic fiction, derived from the word apocalypse, meaning revelation or the clarification of secrets about the future, examines the end of civilization due to epidemics, nuclear war, cybernetic uprising, supernatural events, ecological disasters or other disasters. The Last Man is the first major novel to deal with a subject that has become so common today that it is considered ordinary: the extinction of humanity. Shelley dramatizes the effects of an epidemic on the Western world with the fluent style of the Romantic period and conveys it through a fiction centered around contrasting characters that are reflections of real people. The major characters in the novel are inspired, in whole or in part, by people around Shelley. For example, Adrian, who drags his acquaintances along in search of a natural paradise, is a fictionalized portrait of the author's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Lord Raymond, who set out from England to fight the Greeks and died in Istanbul, was inspired by the life of Lord Byron. The novel also expresses the author's pain at losing his environment, which he calls "the elite", the meaninglessness of the world, and the individual's lack of power to direct history. In his diary, Shelley refers to the “last man” as “my alter ego, my second self, the relic left behind from a beloved group when my comrades have predeceased me.” (From the Promotional Bulletin)