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Mary Shelley mined the ideas of international thought to help develop three new subgenres of modern political science fiction (‘poliscifi’): post-apocalyptic, existential, and dystopian. Her two great works of poliscifi, Frankenstein (1818), and The Last Man (1826) – confront the social problems that arise from humanity's technological and cultural interventions in the wider environment. This article recovers The Last Man not only as the first modern post-apocalyptic pandemic novel, but also as an important source for the existentialist tradition, dystopian literature, and their intersections with what I call ‘Literary IR’. Comparing The Last Man with its probable sources and influences – from Thucydides and Vattel to Orwell and Camus – reveals Shelley's ethical and political concerns with the overlapping problems of interpersonal and international conflict. The Last Man dramatises how interpersonal conflict, if left unchecked, can spiral into the wider sociopolitical injustices of violence, war, and other human-made disasters such as species extinction, pandemics, and more metaphorical ‘existential’ plagues like loneliness and despair. Despite these dark themes and legacies, Shelley's authorship of the great plague novel of the nineteenth century also inspired a truly hopeful post-apocalyptic existential response to crisis and conflict in feminist poliscifi by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Emily St. John Mandel.

The discipline of anthropology is, at its best, characterized by turbulence, self-examination, and inventiveness. In recent decades, new thinking and practice within the field has certainly reflected this pattern, as shown for example by numerous fruitful ventures into the \"politics and poetics\" of anthropology. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to the simple insight that anthropology is composed of claims, whether tacit or explicit, about anthropos and about logos--and the myriad ways in which these two Greek nouns have been, might be, and should be, connected.Anthropos Todayrepresents a pathbreaking effort to fill this gap. Paul Rabinow brings together years of distinguished work in this magisterial volume that seeks to reinvigorate the human sciences. Specifically, he assembles a set of conceptual tools--\"modern equipment\"--to assess how intellectual work is currently conducted and how it might change. Anthropos Todaycrystallizes Rabinow's previous ethnographic inquiries into the production of truth about life in the world of biotechnology and genome mapping (and his invention of new ways of practicing this pursuit), and his findings on how new practices of life, labor, and language have emerged and been institutionalized. Here, Rabinow steps back from empirical research in order to reflect on the conceptual and ethical resources available today to conduct such inquiries. Drawing richly on Foucault and many other thinkers including Weber and Dewey, Rabinow concludes that a \"contingent practice\" must be developed that focuses on \"events of problematization.\" Brilliantly synthesizing insights from American, French, and German traditions, he offers a lucid, deeply learned, original discussion of how one might best think about anthropos today.

Building on recent scholarship that explores MaryShelley’s advocacy for sympathy in The Last Man (1826), this essay traces the complexity of interpersonal and reader-text relations as they play out in the novel and in the experience of reading it. I argue that moments of intimacy explicitly called “sympathy” in the novel are often idealizations that turn “revolting” as sympathy becomes something other than the beneficial exchange that participants expect of it. These scenes delineate a politics of sympathy that challenges the dominant model with a portrayal of human intimacy as uncontrollable, amoral, and infectious. Shelley encodes in the novel’s infamous plague her concern that the experience of sympathy that underlies nineteenth-century politics of community- and nation-formation can and sometimes does generate violence, discord, and inequality alongside mutually beneficial relationships. Exploring readers’ uncertain responses to the novel alongside the novel’s representation of sympathy as revolting, I suggest that the novel’s framing “Introduction” reveals an aesthetics of sympathy in which reader-text relations are constitutively unstable. Readers’ resistance to Lionel’s effusive narration is a revolting response written into the novel’s sympathetic design. By making sympathetic reading a revolting experience, Shelley advances a revision of sympathy that forces us to rethink the possibilities and the consequences of human relationships and invites us to reimagine a communal future that makes room for those realities.

Composed after the destruction of her beloved circle of family and friends, Mary Shelley's The Last Man conducts readers through a narrative heretofore unrecognized as exceedingly experimental. This essay argues that Shelley incorporates a language of sound and music into The Last Man to amplify the intellectual and emotional resonance of her highly inventive novel. It begins by examining the musical musings in Shelley's journals and letters in the months surrounding The Last Man's inception, suggesting these forays as origins of innovations that find ultimate expression in the novel. Next, close readings of The Last Man's musical metaphors and sonically themed references solidify music as a textual hermeneutic and as a metaphor for artistic community inside and outside the world of the novel. This essay concludes that Shelley's text incorporates elements of written musical scores. Shelley's unique novel thus unites the language of narrative with the language of written music.

This essay considers Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) as intervening in the ongoing debate between Thomas Malthus and William Godwin. Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) in large part as a response to Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and “Of Avarice and Profusion” (1797); Godwin later wrote an extended refutation of Malthus in Of Population (1820). Mary Shelley uses The Last Man, a story of the end of the human species, in part as a meditation on the merits of Malthus's philosophical positions in the Essay on the Principle of Population, but she seems to disagree with a number of the mechanisms he identifies: in contrast to Malthus, Shelley identifies a blind and random nature rather than any divine plan as controlling population change, and disease rather than food scarcity as the primary cause of population reduction, but insists upon the importance of individuating and empathizing with the suffering.

In The Last Man, Mary Shelley builds on Edmund Burke's aesthetic theory and Ann Radcliffe's definition of Gothic terror as elevating and imaginative by projecting sublime terror onto her landscapes. Yet, her characters' identification with sublime landscapes insufficiently articulates their visceral pain; Shelley also emphasises the horrible, physical dimensions of her characters' suffering, asserting the primacy of their bodies as sites of their identities and afflictions. The freezing, grotesque horror of disease conflicts with the landscape's elevating sublimity, as the Romantic and Gothic aesthetic categories of terror and horror collide in Shelley's efforts to articulate the materiality of her characters' traumatic experiences.

When Mary Shelley began writing The Last Man in 1824 in the wake of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley’s untimely death, she drew from her close circle of family and friends as models for her main characters. Although it is tempting to view this novel as an autobiographical expiation of the profound sorrow that overwhelmed Shelley at her husband’s death, to do so is to underestimate her prescient political insight and to risk overlooking the complex implications of class and rank that suffuse the position of the narrator, Lionel Verney. While Shelley’s emotions give a passionate appeal to this novel, her intellectual ideas infuse the novel’s powerful critique of British governance. The Last Man is narrated in a political framework in which war and the clash of empires, parliamentary and republican conflict, turbulent revolution, and social and political corruption arrange the fates of the characters. In addition, the plague that silently and invisibly takes over Western Europe and England serves as a spectral process of corrosive malignity from outside, ensnaring all efforts to fix a domestic English system that is collapsing around individuals and the collective.

Addresses The Last Man, a relatively short narrative by Blanchot whose influences and aesthetics are unpacked here. We are shown how the thinking of notions such as language, solitude, and death carried out in previous fiction and criticism is pursued further.

On an individual level, it’s hard to see anything wrong with the deeds Superman performs on a daily basis. Superman seems to cast aside his earlier secrecy by openly thwarting a series of petty crimes, such as a purse‐snatching and a liquor store heist. Nietzsche argues that Superman’s constant rescuing of mankind from problems that we could tackle on our own might cultivate weakness in the rescued. Superman’s presence on Earth actually leads humanity down the dark path toward the idle contentment of the last man. If we believe Nietzsche, we might now think that Superman should just leave us alone, let us stand on our own two feet, and learn from mistakes and tragedies in order to better ourselves. Moral philosopher Peter Singer argues that donating as much money as we can reasonably afford to give is the only ethical action to take in the face of human suffering.

Whether Goethe actually cried \"More light!\" on his deathbed, or whether Conrad Hilton checked out of this world after uttering \"Leave the shower curtain on the inside of the tub,\" last words, regardless of authenticity, have long captured the imagination of Western society. In this playfully serious investigation based on factual accounts, anecdotes, literary works, and films, Karl Guthke explores the cultural importance of those words spoken at the border between this world and the next. The exit lines of both famous and ordinary people embody for us a sense of drama and truthfulness and reveal much about our thoughts on living and dying. Why this interest in last words? Presenting statements from such figures as Socrates, Nathan Hale, Marie Antoinette, and Oscar Wilde (\"I am dying as I have lived, beyond my means\"), Guthke examines our fascination in terms of our need for closure, our desire for immortality, and our attraction to the mystique of death scenes. The author considers both authentic and invented final statements as he looks at the formation of symbols and legends and their function in our culture. Last words, handed down from generation to generation like cultural heirlooms, have a good chance of surviving in our collective memory. They are shown to epitomize a life, convey a sense of irony, or play to an audience, as in the case of the assassinated Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, who is said to have died imploring journalists: \"Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.\"