Abstract

The purpose of the dissertation is to revise the general understanding of Mary Shelley's political philosophy in her novel The Last Man, published in 1826. As a second generation Romantic, raised on the precepts of both Godwin's theory of social anarchy and Wollstonecraft's feminism, in addition to the Romantic poets' views of nature, Shelley was influenced by elements of thought that, taken in conjunction, are comparable to contemporary ecofeminism. In the novel, she creates a cultural/social/critical ecofeminist characterization of nature encompassing myth, politics, and philosophy. Ecofeminism is a diverse international and multidisciplinary movement that comprises feminist alternatives to patriarchal religions, scholarly research, and feminist, environmental, and anti-war political activism. Because Shelley's critique of Western rationalism is not only Romantic but also feminist and scholarly, her work is an important precursor of the critical ecofeminist discourse that would formally emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. Although post-Marxist philosophers and theorists have sometimes disregarded natural philosophy due to the challenges raised by historical materialism, the recent development of numerous ecological theories has reinstated the relevance of studying this long-standing Western philosophical tradition. Political and philosophical writers relevant to the historicist study of the novel include classical philosophers of nature, Enlightenment thinkers, and Romantic philosophers and poets such as the pre-Socratics, Cicero, Kant, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Percy Shelley, Byron, Hegel, and others. The critical and cultural discourses of ecofeminism---influenced by cultural and socialist feminism and social ecology, in addition to other important allied resources such as Irigaray's French feminism and other recent theorists such as Weber, Foucault, and Serres---provide a more coherent reading of the novel. Such a critical lens tends to resolve Mary Shelley's contested position within Romanticism. Like contemporary ecofeminists , Shelley's goal was to initiate a new and sustained balance in Western culture between epistemology and ontology based on an increased awareness of, interaction with, and respect for nature