This Norton Critical Edition includes: The 1826 Henry Colburn edition of the novel, the only one approved by Mary Shelley. - Introduction and explanatory footnotes by Chris Washington. - A rich selection of contextual documents--twenty-six in all--pertaining to The Last Man 's background and sources, reception and impact, other related works by Shelley, and other "Last Man" texts. - Fourteen carefully chosen critical assessments on the novel's major themes. - A chronology of Mary Shelley's life and work and a selected bibliography Chris Washington is an assistant professor of English at Francis Marion University. He specializes in British Romantic literature, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and poetics, and literary theory. His articles have appeared in European Review, Essays in Romanticism, Literature Compass , and Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons . With Anne McCarthy he is the coeditor of Romanticism and Speculative Realism , forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press.