“This Automaton of Flesh”: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man , the Paradox of the Moderns, and Romantic Ecohorror

Abstract

This essay reads Mary Shelley’s The Last Man alongside Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern and his later work addressing the climate crisis, exploring how the novel instantiates and critiques the complex relationship between nature, culture, science, and politics that Latour refers to as the “modern Constitution.” As it dramatizes the tensions within Romantic-era sciences and the wider discourse of philosophical vitalism in Romanticism, The Last Man performs an extended meditation on materiality that prefigures Latour’s insistence that facing the future in a time of climate crisis depends upon letting go of the conception of nature inherited by the Moderns as an organizing cultural concept. I situate this reading within critical conversations about contemporary apocalyptic fiction and ecohorror in order to argue that the The Last Man —and by extension, Romanticism—offers opportunities to imagine how human and nonhuman forms of agency could work together to compose different stories about life in the Anthropocene.