Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: Sibylline Leaves

Matthew Rowney, a writer in residence in the Library’s Wertheim Study and pre-Doctoral fellow at the Graduate Center of the City of New York, will discuss Mary Shelley’s groundbreaking work in terms of both Shelley’s personal life and of the time in which she lived.

In our current moment, where fears of ecological disaster, epidemics, and economic meltdown abound, The Last Man has become a source of increasing attention and interest.  Written shortly after the deaths of her husband Percy and friend Lord Byron, the novel contemplates the end of an era, expressing a complex ambivalence about the foundations and transmission of culture.  Though apocalypse was a popular theme at the time, no work on this subject was to create such a haunting and resonant picture of a world in a state of ongoing disaster.

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