The last man and Gothic sympathy

This Element explores the theme of 'Gothic sympathy' as it appears in a collection of 'Last Man' novels.

A liminal site of both possibility and irreconcilability, Gothic sympathy at once challenges the anthropocentric bias of traditional notions of sympathetic concern, premising compassionate relations with other beings – animal, vegetal, etc. – beyond the standard measure of the liberal-humanist subject, and at the same time acknowledges the horror that is the ineluctable and untranslatable otherness accompanying, interrupting, and shaping such a sympathetic connection.

Many examples of 'Last Man' fiction explore the dialectical impasse of Gothic sympathy by dramatizing complicated relationships between a lone liberal-humanist subject and other-than-human or posthuman subjects that will persist beyond humanity's extinction.

Such confrontations as they appear in Mary Shelley's The Last Man, H.G.

Wells's The Time Machine, and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend will be explored.