This eBook has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. The Last Man is a post-apocalyptic novel which tells of a future world that has been ravaged by a plague. Lionel Verney or The Last Man is the orphan son of an impoverished nobleman. Lionel is originally lawless, self-willed, and resentful of the nobility for casting aside his father. When he is befriended by Adrian, son of the last King of England, he embraces civilization and particularly scholarship.

Beyond her most famous creation—the nightmarish vision of Frankenstein’s Creature—Mary Shelley’s most enduring influence on politics, literature, and art perhaps stems from the legacy of her lesser-known novel about the near-extinction of the human species through war, disease, and corruption. This novel, The Last Man (1826), gives us the iconic image of a heroic survivor who narrates the history of an apocalyptic disaster in order to save humanity—if not as a species, then at least as the practice of compassion or humaneness. In visual and musical arts from 1826 to the present, this postapocalyptic figure has transmogrified from the “last man” into the globally familiar filmic images of the “invisible man” and the “final girl.” Reading Shelley’s work against the background of epidemic literature and political thought from ancient Greece to Covid-19, Eileen M. Hunt reveals how Shelley’s postapocalyptic imagination has shaped science fiction and dystopian writing from H. G. Wells, M. P. Shiel, and George Orwell to Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Emily St. John Mandel. Through archival research into Shelley’s personal journals and other writings, Hunt unearths Shelley’s ruminations on her own personal experiences of loss, including the death of young children in her family to disease and the drowning of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s grief drove her to intensive study of Greek tragedy, through which she developed the thinking about plague, conflict, and collective responsibility that later emerges in her fiction. From her readings of classic works of plague literature to her own translation of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, and from her authorship of the first major modern pandemic novel to her continued influence on contemporary popular culture, Shelley gave rise to a tradition of postapocalyptic thought that asks a question that the Covid-19 pandemic has made newly urgent for many: What do humans do after disaster?

The Scarlet Plague is a post-apocalyptic tale set in 2073, sixty years after an uncontrollable epidemic, the Red Death, has depopulated the planet. James Howard Smith is one of the few survivors of the pre-plague era left alive in the San Francisco area, and he travels with his grandsons Edwin, Hoo-Hoo, and Hare-Lip, who live as primeval hunter-gatherers in a heavily depopulated world. Smith, whom they call "Granser", decides to tell them the story of the disease alternately referred to as scarlet plague, scarlet death, or red death. Jack London (1876-1916) was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. His amazing life experience also includes being an oyster pirate, railroad hobo, gold prospector, sailor, war correspondent and much more. He wrote adventure novels & sea tales, stories of the Gold Rush, tales of the South Pacific and the San Francisco Bay area - most of which were based on or inspired by his own life experiences.

This is the first extended study to specifically focus on character in dystopia. Through the lens of the "last man" figure, Character and Dystopia: The Last Men examines character development in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, and Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male, showing how in the 20th and 21st centuries dystopian nostalgia shades into reactionary humanism, a last stand mounted in defense of forms of subjectivity no longer supported by modernity. Unlike most work on dystopia that emphasizes dystopia’s politics, this book’s approach grows out of questions of poetics: What are the formal structures by which dystopian character is constructed? How do dystopian characters operate differently than other characters, within texts and upon the reader? What is the relation between this character and other forms of literary character, such as are found in romantic and modernist texts? By reading character as crucial to the dystopian project, the book makes a case for dystopia as a sensitive register of modern anxieties about subjectivity and its portrayal in literary works.

Romantic Futures is a collection which explores the significance of futurity in British Romanticism from a comparative perspective in three defining manifestations: the future as conscious legacy, by which is meant both influences or continuities and the (anticipations of) impact on the future; the future as revealed by prophecy, whether via religious figures or superstitions; and a meditation on the temporality of the future, or the future as a concept. The book brings together a wide range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives: from utopian studies, history, religion, and cultural theory to future studies, neuroscience, video games, and art history. Aiming to increase and diversify current critical engagement and highlight the contemporary relevance of the Romantics’ multivalent preoccupation with the future, this collection renews the dialogue between Romanticism and our critical relation to its contemporaneity, especially as it speaks to current understandings of the future in the sciences, arts, and humanities.

Sometime after World War I, although the allies won, USA were devastated and collapsed economically, which was exploited by the technologically advanced "Mongolians," who started their campaign of world conquest. In 2019 the Mongolians attacked the US using fleets of airships armed with disintegrator rays. After conquering the US, these "Airlords of Han" ruled North America as a province of the world empire. Living in cooperative gangs and hiding in the forests from the Hans, Americans secretly rebuild their civilization and develop the new technologies, and only now, four centuries later, begin to rebel. The main character, Anthony 'Buck' Rogers, was a veteran of the Great War and in 1927 he worked for the American Radioactive Gas Corporation. Exposed to radioactive gas, Rogers fell into a coma and remained in "sleep" for 492 years. He awakens in 2419 and, thinking he has been asleep for just several hours, wanders for a few days in unfamiliar forests. Introduced to the new world, Rogers becomes the leader of the American rebellion. "The Airlords of Han" – In the sequel to Armageddon 2419 A.D and the 'Buck' Rogers story, the hero and his beloved Wilma continue their war against the diabolical Han and technologically advanced Mongolians. Rogers gets captured by the Han and gets taken to their capital, where he serves as prisoner, but gets the treatment of a royal guest. Rogers exploits these circumstances to stick a knife in the heart of the enemy.

"Jill Lepore is unquestionably one of America’s best historians; it’s fair to say she’s one of its best writers too." —Jonathan Russell Clark, Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2023: New Yorker, TIME A book to be read and kept for posterity, The Deadline is the art of the essay at its best. Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore’s life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” Echoing Gore Vidal’s United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay—and of history—itself.

This five-volume work consists in biographies of the most important writers and thinkers of their time, since 14th until 19th century. Most of them were written by the Romantic writer Mary Shelley. Her extensive knowledge of history and languages, her ability to tell a gripping biographical narrative, and her interest in the burgeoning field of feminist historiography are reflected in these works. She wrote in a style that combined secondary sources, memoir, anecdote, and her own opinions. Her political views are most obvious in the Italian Lives, where she supports the Italian independence movement and promotes republicanism; in the French Lives she portrays women sympathetically, explaining their political and social restrictions and arguing that women can be productive members of society if given the proper educational and social opportunities. Contents: Vol. 1: Lives of the most eminent literary and scientific men of France (Part. I): Montaigne Rabelais Corneille Rochefoucauld Molière La Fontaine Pascal Madame de Sévigné Boileau Racine Fénélon Vol. 2: Lives of the most eminent literary and scientific men of France (Part. II): Voltaire Rousseau Condorcet Mirabeau Madame Roland Madame de Staël. Vol. 3: Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (Part. I): Dante Petrarch Boccaccio Lorenzo de' Medici, &c. Bojardo Berni Ariosto Machiavelli Vol. 4: Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (Part. II): Galileo Guicciardini Vittoria Colonna Guarini Tasso Chiabrera Tassoni Marini Filicaja Metastasio Goldoni Alfieri Monti Ugo Foscolo Vol. 5: Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (Part. III): Boscan Garcilaso de la Vega Diego Hurtado de Mendoza Luis de Leon Herrera Saa de Miranda Jorge de Montemayor Castillejo The early dramatists Ercilla Cervantes Lope de Vega Vicente Espinel; Esteban de Villegas Gongora Quevedo Calderon Early poets of Portugal Camoens

This meticulously edited Mary Shelley collection is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: Novels: Frankenstein (Original Edition, 1818) Frankenstein (Revised Edition, 1831) The Last Man Valperga The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck Lodore Falkner Short Stories: The Sisters of Albano Ferdinando Eboli The Evil Eye The Dream The Mourner The False Rhyme A Tale of the Passions; or, The Death of Despina The Mortal Immortal Transformation The Swiss Peasant The Invisible Girl The Brother and Sister The Parvenue The Pole Euphrasia The Elder Son The Pilgrims On Ghosts The Hair of Mondolfo Plays: Proserpine Midas Travel Narratives: History of a Six Weeks' Tour Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley The Life & Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by Florence Ashton Marshall