ABSTRACT
Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is a postapocalyptic tale of a twenty-first-century world ravaged by a deadly plague. Unlike the early Romantic pantheistic notion, expressed in Coleridge’s “The Aeolian Harp” of a “One Life within us and abroad,” The Last Man presents what I call a “one death” that dramatically reshapes Romantic communicability into a viral form specific only to humans. Rather than demonstrating the common link between the natural and the human, Shelley’s novel illustrates how human-centered worldviews erode the very support systems necessary for human life on Earth.
