Table of Contents

"Betwixt the world destroyed and the world restored" - Milton and the universal rack; the first last man? - Thomas Burnet and the revolution in time; towards the last of the race - Robinson Cursoe as sole survivor; the last bards; "shortliv'd as foliage is the race of man" - the last of the race and the natural world; "strength in what remains behind" - Wordsworth and the last of the race; "as the last of my race I must wither away" - the 6th Lord Byron; the last men; new ideas of race - "The Last of the Mohicans"; Edward Bulwer and the "Terror of History"; the last chapter - after Darwin.

Reviews

`accomplished study...Her book is stimulating and introductory...arresting and original... Complex intellectual history is lucidly explained'
Times Higher Education Supplement
`This is a very ambitious project, and Stafford draws on a vast range of primary and secondary texts, non-literary as well as literary ... her book offers us an original perspective on a wealth of writers from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, and is a substantial contribution to our understanding of the persistence and permutations of an important modern myth.'
Katherine A. Armstrong, Chester College, British Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies, Vol. 19, Pt 1, Spring 1996
`Though Shelley is the focus of only one chapter of this wide-ranging study, it is a measure of the book's usefulness that every other chapter can be read as contextualizing and illuminating Shelley and other Romantics, including Wordsworth and Byron ... a work of cultural history, a study of the changing representations of a highly overdetermined motif.'
Steven Jones, Loyola University, Chicago, The Wordsworth Circle, Autumn '96