A Study Of The Hybiridity Of Genres In Mary Shelley’s Thelast Man

The Last Man is the first ambitious work of Mary Shelley after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death and Mary’s consequent return to London. According to the literary review on researches made by scholars at home and aboard on The Last Man, I have found that currently, the novel has been criticized from four perspectives: political connotation, feminist analysis, humanistic approach and ecological preservation. There is little critical efforts made to discuss the hybridity of different genres in this unique novel. Therefore, this thesis sets out to analyze Mary Shelley’s The Last Man from the perspective of genre approach and discuss her integration and innovation of different genres in the novel.The thesis is divided into five parts: Introduction, three chapters, and Conclusion. Introduction deals with the background of Mary Shelley’s creation of The Last Man, highlighting the family and social factors which cultivated and inspired Mary Shelley to write this novel.Chapter One first defines the generic features of the Romantic novel and then analyzes how The Last Man fits into a Romantic novel with its emphasis on the Romantic concepts such as nature, freedom, imagination, and symbolism.Chapter Two first presents the Dystopian novel as a genre and then discusses in what way The Last Man fuses the features of a Dystopian novel into it.Chapter Three introduces the features of the Gothic novel and then explores how The Last Man borrows the writing style of the Gothic novel and presents the psychological terror and tension, the danger and death that frequently appear in a Gothic novel.Chapter Four analyzes the careful way Mary Shelley hybridizes together some conventions of three genres and explains how this hybridity breaks the convention of novel writing at Mary Shelley’s time and produces unique artistic effect.Conclusion it summarizes the major points of the thesis, and points out that in the novel The Last Man, Mary Shelley has fused the elements of Romantic novel, Dystopian novel, and Gothic novel in an original way, formulating a new of novel and creating a fresh artistic effect.