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. The Body and the Early Modern State: From More to Cavendish. Fiction, the Body and the State -- Anatomy, Early Modernity and the Prosthetic Imagination -- Utopian Self-Fashioning from More to Cavendish -- The Prosthetic Imagination in the Early Novel Form -- The Colonial Body: From Behn to Goethe. Economies of Scale From Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott -- Colonialism and the World Picture in the Eighteenth-Century Novel -- Invisible Ink: Self-Fashioning and Self-Erasure in Daniel Defoe -- A Continuation of the Brain: Unregulated Bodies in Swift and Scott -- Organic Aesthetics from Richardson to Goethe -- The Organic and the Mechanic -- The Full and the Empty -- Attachment and Evasion -- The Manufactured Body: From Wollstonecraft to Stoker. The Dead Hand: Realism and Biomaterial -- The Dead Hand: Realism and Biomaterial in the Nineteenth-Century -- Irony and Biocritique from Wollstonecraft to Austen -- The Dyer's Hand: Narrative and Biomaterial in Dickens and Eliot -- An Inside Narrative: Prosthetic life in Melville -- Strange Affinity: Gothic Prosthetics from Shelley to Stoker -- The Modernist Body: From James to Beckett -- A Duplication of Consciousness: Realism -- A Duplication of Consciousness: Realism, Modernism and Prosthetic Self-Fashioning -- Modernism and the Fin de Siècle -- Art and Embodiment in James and Wharton -- All Twined Together: Prosthetic Modernism from Proust to Beckett -- Survival and Annihilation Entwined Within Me: Gathering and Dispersal in the Modernist Novel -- Landscape of Prosthetics and Simulacra -- The Limits of the Word -- Like-lines: Simulacral Prosthetics in Morrison and Pynchon -- Prosthetic Worlds in the Twenty-First-Century Novel. World, Nature, Culture -- Hand, Face, Wall -- Mind, Body, World 03.0_pp_iv_iv_Copyright_page 2 04.0_pp_v_v_Dedication 6 05.0_pp_vi_vi_Epigraph 7 06.0_pp_vii_viii_Contents 8 07.0_pp_ix_ix_Illustrations 10 08.0_pp_x_xii_Acknowledgements 11 09.0_pp_1_24_Introduction 14 10.0_pp_25_70_The_Body_and_the_Early_Modern_State_From_More_to_Cavendish 38 10.1_pp_27_70_Fiction_the_Body_and_the_State 40 11.0_pp_71_146_The_Colonial_Body_From_Behn_to_Goethe 84 11.1_pp_73_116_Economies_of_Scale_from_Aphra_Behn_to_Sarah_Scott 86 11.2_pp_117_146_Organic_Aesthetics_from_Richardson_to_Goethe 130 12.0_pp_147_222_The_Manufactured_Body_From_Wollstonecraft_to_Stoker 160 12.1_pp_149_200_The_Dead_Hand_Realism_and_Biomaterial_in_the_Nineteenth-Century_Novel 162 12.2_pp_201_222_Strange_Affinity_Gothic_Prosthetics_from_Shelley_to_Stoker 214 13.0_pp_223_284_The_Modernist_Body_From_James_to_Beckett 236 13.1_pp_225_257_A_Duplication_of_Consciousness_Realism_Modernism_and_Prosthetic_Self-Fashioning 238 13.2_pp_258_284_All_Twined_Together_Prosthetic_Modernism_from_Proust_to_Beckett 271 14.0_pp_285_354_The_Posthuman_Body_From_Orwell_to_Atwood 298 14.1_pp_287_318_Prosthetics_and_Simulacra_The_Postmodern_Novel 300 14.2_pp_319_354_Prosthetic_Worlds_in_the_Twenty-First-Century_Novel 332 15.0_pp_355_382_Notes 368 16.0_pp_383_400_Bibliography 396 17.0_pp_401_412_Index 414 "What is the relation between the mimetic and the prosthetic? How does the process of making pictures or likenesses of reality (in paint, in film, in prose) relate to our fashioning of artificial bodies, the manufacturing of the plastic forms with which we augment and enhance our naked extension into the world, what Freud calls the mere 'inch of nature' which we are given? This question was given a rather palpable form for me when, as part of my initial preparation for writing this book, I spent some time with a prosthetic surgeon who specialises in facial prosthetics. The surgeon - Charles - took me to a room in which there were a number of wooden cabinets, where he stored facial prostheses in drawers. He wanted to show me some of them, he said, in order to give me a sense of the range of different kinds of prostheses he made. He had these faces in his possession because, as his patients aged or grew, he regularly updated their prostheses"-- Provided by publisher This book offers an account of the historical development of the novel as a means of imagining and fashioning our bodies and our environments, in order to suggest that prose fiction can help us to understand new forms of artificial life as they are emerging in the twenty-first century.