Revolution and Ruin Book Club: Mary Shelley's The Last Man

Welcome to episode one of The Culture We Deserve's Book Club, Revolution and Ruin: Reading the European 19th Century. In this inaugural episode, Joseph and Jessa discuss Mary Shelley's The Last Man, a prophetic novel about disease, war, and the end of mankind. Unlike the apocalyptic spectacles of your standard end of the world movies and television shows, Shelley's slow burn gets into the grief and despair of humanity's end. Shelley was born at the tail end of the French Revolution and just before the revolutions of 1848, and she is invested in the questions of her era: how should a nation organize itself? how should resources be distributed? how is a person to live amid disruption and unpredictability? And what is the point of making art during tumult? Join the discussion at: http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com