Melissa Bailes’ “The Psychologization of Geological Catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.”

摘要

Melissa Bailes explores the ways in which Mary Shelley's novel, The Last Man (1826),is crucially informed by the catastrophist theories of Georges Cuvier and WilliamBuckland. Emphasising that previous scholarship predominantly focused on the plagueas the cause of human extinction in the novel, Bailes makes the case for understandingShelley as staging individual deaths in terms of catastrophe within a Cuvierianframework of geohistory. In doing so, Shelley is seen to challenge scientificgeneralisations about species extinction by shifting geological catastrophe into thepsychological world of an individual.