The Prosthetic Imagination
A History of the Novel as Artificial Life

'This is a dazzling study of the prosthetic imagination in prose fiction, the logic which does not refer to the world but produces it. Boxall's thesis entails an entire re-reading of the novel's history as well as the abandonment of realist criteria. Biotechnology and the idea of replacement, the 'seam' that connects imagination to its material extension, shape the novel from the start, from More to Modernism, from Cervantes to Eliot. The wonderful juxtapositions, More and Asimov, Hobbes and Timothy Clark, Goethe and Kleist, Dickens and Agambon, constantly surprise. Central to this study is a brilliant reading of the hand and its social and biological roles. Just as certainly as the prosthetic affirms the novel's artificial life, so it brings death into the fictional world.' Isobel Armstrong, University of London

'The Prosthetic Imagination is a major book: it does nothing less than to rewrite Erich Auerbach's Mimesis as an epic struggle between consciousness that materializes as information and material that resists that transformation. By thus reframing the history of the novel in terms of the changing relation between prothesis and mimesis, this account does what none other has - which is to reveal, in an extraordinary range of novels, the dialectical potential that pushes past the juncture where thought materializes in and as the world. Boxall has convinced me that we are seeing now nothing less than a shift from material embodiment to information as the basis of 'shared being' – a shift which requires 'a different universe of thought'.' Nancy Armstrong, Duke University

'In The Prosthetic Imagination Boxall … reveals his impressive breadth of acquaintance with novels, from Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to books of the 21st century.' G. W. Clift, Choice

'Peter Boxall's rich and often exhilarating The Prosthetic Imagination offers an ambitious theory of the novel as well as a wide-ranging (if largely AngloAmerican) history of it, from Thomas More to Don DeLillo … a tour de force.' Ian Duncan, Modern Philology

'… 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