"By reading Mary Shelley's pandemic novel The Last Man and gothic romance "The Invisible Girl" against the background of plague literature and international thought from ancient Greece to Covid-19, this book reveals how she shaped the classics of modern existentialism and dystopian political science fiction from H. G. Wells to Emily St. John Mandel. It is this Shelleyan literary tradition that has generated modern postapocalyptic political thought, which uses writing and other art to reflect upon the global existential question: What is to be done after a massive, human-made disaster?"--