{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"The Last Man Standing: Shelley's Plague Apocalypse","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/6a28001ca917ce4c7065c483/cf5fb8b2-e71f-4e43-a2bd-a478ea5646ca.jpg?height=200","description":"Eight years after Frankenstein, Mary Shelley published The Last Man — the first major apocalyptic novel in English literature, set in a late 21st-century world (2073–2100) destroyed by plague. Written after the deaths of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and three of her four children, the novel is saturated with grief and post-Napoleonic disillusionment. The empty cities, the collapse of social structures, the plague as social leveler — all anticipate the climate collapse and pandemic fiction of two centuries later. Shelley pioneered not one but two of science fiction's most enduring subgenres (the mad scientist story and the apocalypse narrative), yet The Last Man was largely forgotten — out of print from 1833 to 1954 — until it was rediscovered in the 1960s, with feminist scholars providing deeper critical attention from the 1970s onward (notably Anne K. Mellor's foundational 1988 study). This episode explores how grief and political despair fueled the invention of end-times literature.","author_name":"Atween Studios"}