The Possibility of Literature
The Novel and the Politics of Form

Peter Boxall offers here a powerful and singular exploration of the imaginative possibilities of literature in a dramatically changing world.

Peter Boxall (Author)

9781009314299, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 September 2024

408 pages
23.6 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm, 0.71 kg

'In this groundbreaking study, leading scholar of the novel Peter Boxall considers what makes literature possible-and what literature makes possible-at a time when the very survival of the planet looks increasingly impossible.  The climate emergency, Boxall contends, puts in question the relation between culture and nature, human and inhuman, requiring an overhaul of existing critical and creative modes.  Ranging widely from Cervantes to Maria Edgeworth to Emily Dickinson; from Herman Melville and W. B. Yeats, to Henry James, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf; from Philip Roth and Don DeLillo to James Kelman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith, Boxall argues that their writing presses against limits to open up a glimpse of possibility, however fleeting and ungraspable.  'This capacity of literary writing to exceed its own terms,' Boxall proposes, 'is the engine of literary possibility.'' Maud Ellmann, Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor Emerita, University of Chicago

The Possibility of Literature is an essential collection from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in contemporary literary studies. Bringing together key compositions from the last twenty-five years, as well as several new pieces, the book demonstrates the changing fate of literary thinking over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Peter Boxall traces here the profound shifts in the global conditions that make literature possible as these have occurred in the historical passage from 9/11 to Covid 19. Exploring questions such as 'The Idea of Beauty', the nature of 'Mere Being', or the possibilities of Rereading, the author anatomises the myriad forces that shape the literary imagination. At the same time, he gives vivid critical expression to the imaginative possibilities of literature itself – those unique forms of communal life that literature makes possible in a dramatically changing world, and that lead us towards a new shared future.

Introduction: the possibility of literature
Part I. On Writers: 1. A sort of crutch: race and prosthesis in Herman Melville's fiction
2. Samuel Beckett: towards a political reading
3. A leap out of our biology: history, tautology and biomatter in DeLillo's later fiction
4. A more sophisticated imitation: Ishiguro and the novel
5. A cleaving in the mind: Kelman's later novels
6. Zadie Smith, E. M. Forster and the idea of beauty
Part II. On Literary History: 7. The threshold of vision: the animal gaze in Beckett, Sebald and Coetzee
8. The anatomy of realism: Cervantes, Coetzee and artificial life
9. Back roads: Edgeworth. Bowen. Yeats. Beckett
10. Blind seeing: death writing from Dickinson to the contemporary
11. Mere being: imagination at the end of the mind
Part III. On the Contemporary: 12. Imagining the future in the British novel
13. Shallow intensity: Neoliberalism and the novel
14. To carry now away: happy days in the anthropocene
15. On rereading Proust.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]