The Prosthetic Imagination
A History of the Novel as Artificial Life

This book develops a new theoretical account of the historical role of the novel in fashioning our bodies and environments.

Peter Boxall (Author)

9781108836487, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 September 2020

422 pages
23.6 x 15.9 x 2.7 cm, 0.74 kg

'… a fine achievement that recasts the history of prose fiction from the perspective of the relationship between the living and the non-living, the human and the natural, the natural and the artificial … an original and penetrating contribution …' Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos, Modern Language Review

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.

Introduction. Mimesis and prosthesis
Part I. The Body and the Early Modern State: From More to Cavendish: 1. Fiction, the body and the state
Part II. The Colonial Body: From Behn to Goethe: 2. Economies of scale from Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott
3. Organic aesthetics from Richardson to Goethe
Part III. The Manufactured Body: From Wollstonecraft to Stoker: 4. The dead hand: realism and biomaterial in the nineteenth-century novel
5. Strange affinity: Gothic prosthetics from Shelley to Stoker
Part IV. The Modernist Body: From James to Beckett: 6. A duplication of consciousness: realism, modernism and prosthetic self-fashioning
7. All twined together: prosthetic modernism from Proust to Beckett
Part V. The Posthuman Body: From Orwell to Atwood: 8. Prosthetics and simulacra: the postmodern novel
9. Prosthetic worlds in the twenty-first-century novel.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]