 As literary scholar Kari <unk> writes , The Last Man , more so than Frankenstein , " in its refusal to place humanity at the center of the universe , its questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature ... constitutes a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism . " Specifically , Mary Shelley 's allusions to what radicals believed was a failed revolution in France and the Godwinian , <unk> , and Burkean responses to it , challenge " Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress through collective efforts " . As in Frankenstein , Shelley " offers a profoundly disenchanted commentary on the age of revolution , which ends in a total rejection of the progressive ideals of her own generation " . Not only does she reject these Enlightenment political ideals , but she also rejects the Romantic notion that the poetic or literary imagination can offer an alternative . 
