The Utopian Enlightenment of Romantic Sublime Dissolves into Dystopian Apocalypse Within Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) reconfigures Enlightenment optimism and the Romantic celebration of the sublime into a dystopian meditation on pandemic catastrophe, social disintegration, and human extinction. Situated within the intellectual aftermath of the French Revolution and the political disillusionment of the post-Napoleonic period, the novel interrogates the promises of rational progress, scientific advancement, and human perfectibility against the vulnerability of human civilisation to warfare, ecological disruption, and epidemic mortality. This article examines how Shelley transforms the Romantic sublime from an aesthetic of transcendence and imaginative elevation into an experience of existential isolation, material dissolution, and posthuman uncertainty. Through close textual analysis and interdisciplinary engagement with Romantic literary criticism, ecocriticism, feminist theory, queer and trans* studies, and posthumanist materialism, the study investigates the intersections of utopian political ambition, gendered power, environmental agency, and the fragility of collective existence. Particular attention is given to Raymond’s imperial and technological ambitions, Idris’s compassionate resistance to patriarchal coercion, Evadne’s destabilisation of normative gender identities, and Lionel Verney’s transformation from a socially constituted human subject into an isolated, materially contingent survivor. Drawing on critical interventions by Kathryn Joan Darling, Eileen Hunt Botting, Éva Antal, Yasmin Solomonescu, William D. Brewer, Allison Dushane, and Charlotte Sussman, the article further explores how plague dismantles the ideological structures of Enlightenment individualism, anthropocentric mastery, and civilisational exceptionalism. Comparative consideration of nineteenth-century visual representations and the novel’s subsequent cultural afterlives also illuminates the relationship between extinction, cultural memory, and the survival of literary narratives. The article argues that Shelley’s apocalypse constitutes not merely the terminal collapse of utopian futurity but an epistemological reorientation towards ecological interdependence, mutable identities, and more-than-human existence. Ultimately, The Last Man transforms the Romantic sublime into an aesthetics of dissolution through which the failure of human mastery makes alternative, posthuman conceptions of survival and belonging imaginable.