Breaking aesthetics and universalising plague in Mary Shelley's "The Last Man"

Abstract

For Romantic poets imagination was understood as mainly a bridge to save distances between the world and the self; by means of imagination poets created an aestheticised world: nature was perceived either under the lineaments of beauty or of sublimity. Besides, the Romantic Weltanschauung favoured the resurgence of the anima mundi theme, which came to be very significant: firstly, because the spirit of nature favours poetic inspiration/ creation (wind and harp themes); and secondly, because nature is perceived as both an animated being and a nurturing-nursuring mother. Thus, my aim throughout this essay is to explore the concepts and themes stated above in Mary Shelley ’s The Last Man (1826) and to show how the author succeeds in subverting Romantic pretensions so that her work is to be understood as a dystopian vision of Romantic theory. Para los poetas románticos la imaginación era un puente necesario para salvar las distancias entre el mundo y el yo, y haciendo uso de ella estetizaron el mundo según las categorías estéticas de belleza y sublimidad. Es más, la Weltanschauung romántica permitió el resurgir del motivo del anima mundi, donde la naturaleza era fuente de inspiración, un ser vivo y madre nutricia. A lo largo de este artículo, me propongo explorar las cuestiones arriba mencionadas en la obra de Mary Shelley, The Last Man para mostrar hasta qué punto la autora consigue subvertir las pretensiones románticas y presentar una visión distópica del pensamiento romántico.