The Last Man

By Mary Shelley

Foretelling a cataclysmic global pandemic and economic and climate collapse, Shelley's dystopian vision of the 21st century is re-envisioned by contemporary artists and writers

Conceived and edited by Meg Onli, the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney Museum of Art, The Last Man is a radical reissue of Mary Shelley's apocalyptic 1826 novel on the eve of its 200th anniversary. A dystopian tale of emotional, social, political and planetary devastation set in the 21st century, Shelley's text is reframed through the visual and textual commentary by artists and writers from the Image Text MFA program at Cornell University. Shelley's profoundly relevant reflections on the corruption and vanity of power, and our blindness to the terrible transience of human desire and ambition, are here amplified, annotated and translated into fragments of our troubled present by the artists' contemporary interventions.
Artists include: Maddy Bremner, Nelis Franken, Catherine Gans, Danielle Garcia Tubo, Maxwell Harvey-Sampson, Sara Minsky, Mari Nobematsu-Le Gassic, Monica Regan, David Richards, Crystal Lamar, Genevieve Sachs, Yonatan Schechner, Kamaria Shepherd, Christopher Stiegler.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 173349717X
• ISBN13: 9781733497176
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: Image Text Ithaca Press
• Length: 521 Pages