The Art of Redundancy: Sublime Fiction and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Abstract

Since its publication in 1826, critics have disparaged Mary Shelley’s The Last Man as a bad copy of a tired theme. To the contrary, I argue that Shelley was well aware of the place of her work within the discourse of Lastness that had become so popular during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Shelley made explicit reference to the fact that her novel was a late contribution to the robust discourse on Lastness. She drew attention to the ways in which the concept of repetition is, ironically, pervasive to this discourse. And she intentionally situated Lastness within nineteenth-century aesthetic theory, still widely inflected by Edmund Burke’s theory of sublime. Shelley’s novel explores the limitations of Burke’s theory, which relies upon the concept of art as repetition to establish the necessity of critical distance for a properly sublime experience. The novel re-envisions repetition as a concept that dissembles Burkean critical distance and the hierarchy between the real and the fictional on which it depends. Both a critique of Romantic aesthetic discourse and a major contribution to it, Shelley’s Last Man refigures aesthetic experience, critiquing the limitations of Burke’s sublime without vitiating the potentiality for sublime fiction.