The Last Man and Gothic Sympathy

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

Michael Cameron (Author)

9781009494526, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 March 2024

76 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1 cm, 0.26 kg

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.

1. Gothic sympathy and the last man
2. Shelley's infectious despair
3. Wells's vicious sympathy
4. Matheson's dialectic of posthuman sympathy
References.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]