The Possibility of Literature: The Novel and the Politics of Form

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. Frontmatter Dedication Epigraph Contents Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: The Possibility of Literature Part I - On Writers Chapter 1 - A Sort of Crutch: Race and Prosthesis in Herman Melville’s Fiction Chapter 2 - Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading Chapter 3 - A Leap Out of Our Biology: History, Tautology and Biomatter in DeLillo’s Later Fiction Chapter 4 - A More Sophisticated Imitation: Ishiguro and the Novel Chapter 5 - A Cleaving in the Mind: Kelman’s Later Novels Chapter 6 - Zadie Smith, E. M. Forster and the Idea of Beauty Part II - On Literary History Chapter 7 - The Threshold of Vision: The Animal Gaze in Beckett, Sebald and Coetzee Chapter 8 - The Anatomy of Realism: Cervantes, Coetzee and Artificial Life Chapter 9 - Back Roads: Edgeworth. Bowen. Yeats. Beckett Chapter 10 - Blind Seeing: Deathwriting from Dickinson to the Contemporary Chapter 11 - Mere Being: Imagination at the End of the Mind Part III - On the Contemporary Chapter 12 - Imagining the Future in the British Novel Chapter 13 - Shallow Intensity: Neoliberalism and the Novel Chapter 14 - To Carry Now Away: Happy Days in the Anthropocene Chapter 15 - On Rereading Proust Notes Bibliography Index