Paravictorianism: Mary Shelley and Viral Sovereignty

This article revisits the 2006 diplomatic standoff between Indonesia and the World Health Organization over wild-type (or naturally occurring) viral flu samples in the context of the ongoing War on Terror, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a Romance whose imagination seems to have predicted, improbably, the conceptual conjoining of the two: Mary Shelley's late, reviled apocalypse fantasy, The Last Man (1826). Raza Kolb explores the political and conceptual stakes of global health commentators' readiness to exploit the deep-seated terror of a Muslim planet, sketched out in Romantic shades by Shelley during the Greek Revolution of the 1820s, and reappearing in the invocation of "Viral Sovereignty" as a global threat that public health officials compared to terrorism. In her essay, Raza Kolb argues for the ongoing necessity of postcolonial methods of reading in nineteenth-century studies, and calls on Victorian studies to reckon more robustly and generously with "other" nineteenth-centuryists.