Late Romanticism and the End of Politics
Byron, Mary Shelley, and the Last Men

A provocative examination of how Romantic imaginings of the end of the world shaped thinking about politics and political change.

John Havard (Author)

9781009289207, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 April 2023

217 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.52 kg

In the late Romantic age, demands for political change converged with thinking about the end of the world. This book examines writings by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and their circle that imagined the end, from poems by Byron that pictured fallen empires, sinking islands, and dying stars to the making and unmaking of populations in Frankenstein and The Last Man. These works intersected with and enclosed reflections upon brewing political changes. By imagining political dynasties, slavery, parliament, and English law reaching an end, writers challenged liberal visions of the political future that viewed the basis of governance as permanently settled. The prospect of volcanic eruptions and biblical deluges, meanwhile, pointed towards new political worlds, forged in the ruins of this one. These visions of coming to an end acquire added resonance in our own time, as political and planetary end-times converge once again.

1. The end of politics and the end of the world
2. The last Whigs
3. Byron, Brougham, and the end of slavery
4. 'Crowns in the Dust': the ends of politics in The Last Man
5. New worlds: Frankenstein, The Island, and the ends of the earth.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literature: history & criticism [DS]