The Last Man and Gothic Sympathy

Michael Cameron author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:28th Mar '24

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Last Man and Gothic Sympathy cover

This Element explores the 'Gothic sympathy' as it appears in a collection of 'Last Man' novels.

This Element explores the theme of 'Gothic sympathy' as it appears in a collection of 'Last Man' novels. A liminal site of both possibility and irreconcilability, Gothic sympathy at once challenges the anthropocentric bias of traditional notions of sympathetic concern, premising compassionate relations with other beings – animal, vegetal, etc. – beyond the standard measure of the liberal-humanist subject, and at the same time acknowledges the horror that is the ineluctable and untranslatable otherness accompanying, interrupting, and shaping such a sympathetic connection. Many examples of 'Last Man' fiction explore the dialectical impasse of Gothic sympathy by dramatizing complicated relationships between a lone liberal-humanist subject and other-than-human or posthuman subjects that will persist beyond humanity's extinction. Such confrontations as they appear in Mary Shelley's The Last Man, H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend will be explored.

ISBN: 9781009357531

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 124g

75 pages