The Prosthetic Imagination

A History of the Novel as Artificial Life

Peter Boxall

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781108836487
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108877589
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mimesis and Prosthesis
• Part I The Body and the Early Modern State: From More to Cavendish
• Part II The Colonial Body: From Behn to Goethe
• Part III The Manufactured Body: From Wollstonecraft to Stoker
• Part IV The Modernist Body: From James to Beckett
• Part V The Posthuman Body: From Orwell to Atwood
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index