Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Boxall, Peter

Titel

The prosthetic imagination : a history of the novel as artificial life

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Verknüpfte Titel

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 21 Sep 2020)
• 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:
• 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