The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life

In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More's Utopia to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.

Author: Peter Boxall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 09/03/2020
Pages: 422
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 9.20h x 7.70w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781108836487

About the Author
Boxall, Peter: - Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His books include Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2006), Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (2009), Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (2013), and The Value of the Novel (2015). He has edited a number of collections, including Thinking Poetry (edited with Peter Nicholls, 2013) and Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics, and an edition of Beckett's novel Malone Dies. He is co-editor, with Bryan Cheyette, of volume 7 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English (2016), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1980-2018 (2019), and of the bestselling 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die (2012). He is also the editor of Textual Practice, and the series editor of Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture.