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Posted: 12 Dec 2021

Taken: 11 Dec 2021

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Mary We.Shelley •
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The New Worlds of •
Thomas Robert Malthus •
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THE LAST MAN

THE LAST MAN
Figure 8.1 Fictional Malthusianism

The first new world edition of Mary W. Shelly, ‘The Last man’ (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1833). The author’s name is misspelled here. Reproduced by permission of Harvard Library.


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley


Link to the book:


www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18247/pg18247-images.html
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Just as the American refugees had retraced their ancestors’ passage across the Atlantic, so Shelley’s small band of English survivors retrace their progenitors’ putative migration from the ancient Mediterranean back toward Eden and the globe’s primordial parents. The eventual last man, Lionel Verney, described himself as being one only of “fifty, the only human beings that survived of the flood-teeming earth,” another of Shelley’s digs at Malthus, via the vegetable imaginary. Verney goes to Italy, then, to Greece, as he loses all family and companions and even strangers, who might at least remind him of the human world of language and custom. “I lived upon an earth,” he reports, “whose diminished population of child’s arithmetic might number.” Alone, he plans to sail for Africa and live in hope that an anonymous Adam and Eve had somewhere, somehow, survived to begin human history all over again: “Yet, with not this world be re-peopled, and the children of a saved pair of lovers, in some to me unknown and unattainable seclusion, wandering to these prodigious relics of the ante-pestilential race, seek to learn how beings so wondrous in their achievements, with imaginations infinite, and powers godlike, had departed from their home to an unknown country.” Not only were human fallen, never to recover paradise despite their seemingly godlike powers, but fallen even unto extinction. Astonishingly modern in its pessimism, Shelley’s apocalypse rejected both her father’s utopianism and his antagnoisht’s insistence that humans could, should struggle against nature’s laws, She put her faith neither in nature nor in human nature. ~ Page 271
3 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus
3 years ago.

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