Quarantines: Framing Romantic Narratives of Extinction and Epidemic Experience

Abstract

The essay situates Romantic representations of epidemics in the context of ‘last man narratives’ in vogue around 1800. It focuses on their shared use of ‘framings’ of the sort familiar from the works of Caspar David Friedrich, the Rückenfigur. Through this device, the unthinkable is captured and ‘reined in’, as the focus is directed away from the subject itself and towards its human observer. Such framings are employed, in very different fashion, in the two texts discussed centrally: Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man and Heinrich Heine’s 1831 letters in Französische Zustände. The framings in these narratives of epidemics are compared to those in narratives of human extinction, including the 1777 cantata by Johann Jakob Walder and Leonhard Meister, Der lezte Mensch; Jean Paul’s “Rede des toten Christus vom Weltgebäude herab, dass kein Gott sei”; and Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s novel Le Dernier Homme (1805).