Omar F. Miranda on Teaching and Abridging Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Omar F. Miranda is Associate Professor of English at the University of San Francisco. He is coeditor of Percy Shelley for Our Times (Cambridge UP, 2024) and editor of On the 200th Anniversary of Lord Byron’s Manfred (Romantic Circles Praxis Series, 2019). His article, “The Global Romantic Lyric” (The Wordsworth Circle, 2021), won the Bigger 6 Article of the Year award (2022). He is completing a book on how Romanticism revealed the paradox of celebrity: that public brilliance rests on erasure. Alongside Porscha Fermanis, he is the editor for The New Nineteenth Century book series with Bloomsbury Publishing. He serves as Vice President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America and on the board of The Byron Society of America.

As part of our series about the 2026 Curran Symposium, the K-SAA Communications team interviewed Omar F. Miranda about his abridgement of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man for Romantic Circles. A bicentenary edition of the abridgment is forthcoming from Romantic Circles, expected to be published before the end of the year.

What was your introduction to The Last Man?

I first read The Last Man while preparing for my doctoral exams at NYU. I deliberately put it on my reading list because I knew I wanted to study it. A friend and peer in the program, Alina Romo, suggested it to me, and I became fascinated by it very quickly. It has been part of my intellectual life ever since.

Since you first started teaching the novel, how has the way you teach The Last Man evolved?

Well, I started by teaching the full novel, and now I teach it as an abridgment. That is certainly one change!

I also teach it much more unabashedly through its biographical dimension, especially its roman à clef qualities. Students become very excited when they begin recognizing the Shelleys and Byron in these characters, particularly in courses where we have already spent time with their lives and with the summer of 1816.

I have also come to teach The Last Man through the remarkable network of texts behind it. I teach it alongside Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou L’Italie. I am now writing a chapter on just how deeply Shelley was thinking about Staël while composing the novel, so that relationship has become especially important to me. Byron’s Manfred also enters the conversation, as do Polidori’s The Vampyre and Shelley’s Frankenstein. Percy Shelley’s poetry becomes especially important, including a brief introduction to Prometheus Unbound as a very different imaginative response to some of the questions we encounter in Frankenstein. These works give students wonderful ways into The Last Man because they can suddenly see how much literary history Mary Shelley is carrying into the novel and how radically she transforms it.

More recently, I have also begun teaching the novel through celebrity culture and through questions of nationhood, placement, and displacement. Those questions have become increasingly important to my own scholarship, and The Last Man has offered one of the places where I think through them most intensely.

What was most important to you when embarking on this project?

There is a very personal and collective history behind this edition. I prepared the original abridgment while we were living through COVID-19. I suddenly found myself editing a novel about pandemic disease while experiencing, on an infinitely smaller scale, some of the conditions Shelley had imagined nearly two centuries earlier. Passages I had taught before acquired an entirely different significance.

Ironically, by cutting Shelley’s text, I wanted students to become more deeply immersed in the novel. Volume One can be difficult for first-time readers, and its length alone can put the book beyond the practical limits of many undergraduate courses. I wanted to preserve the central narrative and intellectual richness while making the novel more teachable within the realities of a semester. From the beginning, I have thought of the abridgment as an invitation to Shelley’s complete novel rather than as a substitute for it. If students encounter The Last Man here, become fascinated by it, and eventually want to read the whole thing, then the edition has done exactly what I hoped it would do.

I also wanted to bring readers more quickly to that remarkable moment in Volume Two when the plague begins to “raise its serpent-head on the shores of the Nile.” That geographical detail matters to me, too. The plague begins on the shores of the Nile. Shelley is very precise about that. It then appears in parts of Asia and in Constantinople. That sequence has sometimes become blurred in discussions of the novel, but it matters to how we understand the pandemic Shelley imagines and the geography through which it moves along.

In your introduction to the abridged text, you mention teaching this novel alongside significant climate events as well as a global pandemic. Going into the 2026 Curran Symposium, what is on your mind when situating The Last Man in our current moment?

What a great question. One of the things I find incredible about the structure of The Last Man is that catastrophe brings human systems into the foreground. Once the plague arrives, the novel begins asking what wealth means when money loses its power and what happens to political institutions when the populations they were created to govern begin to disappear. Even national borders become newly unfamiliar when disease moves across them so easily.

That is one reason the novel keeps feeling different to me depending on the moment in which I teach it. During the pandemic, certain passages felt almost unbearably immediate. Students reading the novel today who still remember COVID-19 often have the uncanny feeling that Shelley is writing directly into their own world and lives. Other recent climate events have made parts of the book feel relevant as well, especially Shelley’s attention to weather and the frightening instability of the natural world.

In 2026, I also find myself thinking much more about the novel’s republican politics. Shelley gives us a future Britain that has abolished monarchy and is experimenting with representative government. I keep returning to the question of whether the novel imagines government organized around the common good as a genuine political possibility, or whether even that ideal remains terribly vulnerable, perhaps even naive. Maybe that is a more cynical question than I would have asked of the novel ten years ago, but it is very much on my mind now.

What continues to astonish me, though, is that Shelley never allows those big questions to become merely abstract. The Last Man moves constantly between the intimate and the global. The fate of humanity is always also the loss of a great friend or a family, even of home itself. That movement between the Brobdingnagian, a term Shelley inherits from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the Lilliputian, between the gargantuan and the minuscule, is one reason the novel remains so emotionally powerful even when it is thinking on an almost unimaginable scale. And this is precisely why Volume One, with its immersion in the lives of the principal characters, matters so much. Shelley makes us know these people before she asks us to watch their world disappear.

For the Symposium, the novel is put in conversation with Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Do you have other texts or media you like to pair with the novel?

I have not yet read Station Eleven, so I am actually very intrigued by that pairing.

I have argued elsewhere that The Last Man anticipates some of the enormous imaginative scales we now associate with contemporary science fiction, including stories that eventually move beyond the earth itself. That is part of what makes the novel so astonishing to me. Shelley begins with this intensely personal story about a small circle of people and eventually gives us a human being wandering through an almost empty planet. The imaginative distance the novel tracks is incredible.

So I think there is a huge range of contemporary fiction and film that could be placed alongside it. I have not done much of that formally in my own classroom, largely because The Last Man usually comes at the end of my semester. By that point, the students already have this dense network of Romantic-period texts behind them, and I want to give them time to see how Shelley gathers those works into her novel.

Is there anything else you would like to share with us about this project?

For the forthcoming bicentenary edition, I have tried to think about the student experience first and foremost. I went back through the earlier abridgment very closely and rewrote many of the plot summaries so that students can move between the condensed sections and Shelley’s own prose much more easily. I have also added close to 300 editorial notes. They identify authors and texts, clarify geographical references, explain allusions, and give readers more access to the depth of Shelley’s learning. Working on the notes reminded me just how learned this novel is. Shelley moves across nearly three millennia of cultural history and across a global geography. Once I began annotating the book closely, I kept discovering how much was packed into passages that can initially go by very quickly. I wanted the notes to help students see that richness without interrupting the momentum of reading the novel.

The new edition also includes a character guide and a chronology of Mary Shelley’s life. My hope is that all of these materials will make the book much easier to bring into the classroom, especially for instructors encountering it for the first time. More than anything, I want students to get far enough into The Last Man to discover just how good it is. I think it is one of the most important novels of the period, and after years of teaching and editing it, I still find new things in it every time I return.