Eleven years ago, the late Betty T. Bennett asserted that Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man epitomizes its author’s belief that “through imagination one can re-see the world”(54) because the work “enfranchises a new world order and a new world understanding”(82) facilitated by the natural and vital power of creative thought. On this basis, Bennett cautioned against pointedly selective readings of the piece since such treatments “often uncritically replicate the [unfavorable] reception history of the novel when it was first published” and are “inconsistent with the abiding philosophy in Mary Shelley’s works”(73). Shelley’s philosophy, for Bennett, involves a commitment to sociopolitical critique guided by an unwavering faith in the imagination’s ability to better the world. In her best fiction generally, and in The Last Man especially, Shelley engages the timely and the topical not simply for their own sakes but as a way to spark in her readers the visionary alacrity that revolutionizes the self and so forever transforms a part of humankind. Bennett’s optimistic reading of Shelley’s third published novel may at first seem startling, given that The Last Manrecounts how by the year 2100 a virulent pandemic kills all human life on earth save the narrator, an Englishman named Lionel Verney, who chronicles the history of the disease from its provenance to its cessation. Belonging in part to a body of European literature that includes