Pandemic, prophecy, and politics in Mary Shelley and Emily St John Mandel

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, readers and scholars turn to previous pandemic writing. Among the older accounts of past pandemics, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) stands out for its female author and futuristic, dystopian mode. Among contemporary plague narratives, Station Eleven (2014), by the Canadian writer Emily St John Mandel, offers an eerie echo of Shelley’s plague-infested Europe in the devastated Great Lakes region during a 21st-century pandemic. This article explores the coincident motifs of the two narratives, while focusing on their parallel predictions about the social and political fallout of a pandemic in ways that echo the global experience of coronavirus reaction over the last few years, specifically, the ideological polarization created by anti-pandemic measures.