Peter Boxall is Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published a number of books on the novel, including Twenty-First Century Fiction (2013), The Value of the Novel (2015) and The Prosthetic Imagination (2020, winner of the MLA James Russell Lowell prize). The Possibility of Literature is forthcoming with CUP, and he is currently writing a book entitled Fictions of the West.

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.

"An essential collection from a singular voice in contemporary literary studies. Assembling key compositions from the last twenty-five years, and several new pieces, Boxall demonstrates the changing fate of literary thinking over the first decades of this century while giving critical expression to the imaginative possibilities of literature itself"--