Popis: |
Even as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man revolves around a contagious plague, it studies a parallel phenomenon, trans-corporeal affects that transform bodies, things, and our very notions of materiality. While readers may be more familiar with the diseased feelings of Evadne and Raymond, this paper dwells on the loving kinds of transmogrifying affects that act as forces and as labile materialities. Queer intimacies that transfer between Adrian and Lionel not only alter ontologies (Lionel’s becoming man from animal and back again), but they also rearrange human and animal relations into queer assemblages of people, animals, plants, and noncorporeal entities. Such posthuman affect evinces Shelley’s last, best hope for human strategies of feeling our way through the Anthropocene in order to change the very natures and embodiments of humans. |