The World Was All Before Them: From Preservation to Reconfiguration in Shelley’s The Last Man and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

This article traces shifting literary responses to environmental catastrophe and species extinction in The Last Man (1826) by Mary Shelley and Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood. Through the figures of Lionel Verney and Jimmy (aka Snowman), the novels reimagine the trope of the last man to reflect evolving conceptions of ecological crisis, subjectivity, and humannonhuman relationality. Shelley’s post-apocalyptic landscape emerges as an elegiac space of metaphysical solitude and symbolic ruins, while Atwood depicts a genetically reengineered biosphere shaped by techno-capitalist excess and biopolitical control. The article argues that the shift from Shelley’s Romantic ecophobia to Atwood’s posthuman eco-alienation marks a broader transformation in literary imaginaries of the future: from the sublime indifference to the hyper-mediated ecologies of the Anthropocene. Framed through the lens of ecophobia, the study explores how narration functions as a mechanism of cultural memory and symbolic resistance, recasting survival from a biological imperative into an act of linguistic and ethical persistence. Ultimately, the article seeks to demonstrate that Shelley and Atwood, despite their divergent aesthetics and temporal registers, converge in their portrayal of storytelling as a vital strategy for negotiating the disintegration of anthropocentric paradigms.