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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.
‘The bracing lucidity of Boxall's prose can guide us, captivated, through books we may not know while bringing seasoned masterworks before us as if we'd never read them before-from the ‘immensity' of the ‘mere' in James to the Proustian corpus as its own model of rereading, from the ontological drama of tautology in late DeLillo to the implant and dismantlement of Dickensian realist scaffolds in post-millennial British novels. Even as its founding conditions are probed anew, literary writing-honoring the ‘hinge' of Boxall's title-opens startling cognitive possibilities charted here in essays of high and liberating intelligence.'
Garrett Stewart - James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa
‘In this groundbreaking study, leading scholar of the novel Peter Boxall considers what makes literature possible-and what literature makes possible-at a time when the very survival of the planet looks increasingly impossible. The climate emergency, Boxall contends, puts in question the relation between culture and nature, human and inhuman, requiring an overhaul of existing critical and creative modes. Ranging widely from Cervantes to Maria Edgeworth to Emily Dickinson; from Herman Melville and W. B. Yeats, to Henry James, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf; from Philip Roth and Don DeLillo to James Kelman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith, Boxall argues that their writing presses against limits to open up a glimpse of possibility, however fleeting and ungraspable. ‘This capacity of literary writing to exceed its own terms,' Boxall proposes, ‘is the engine of literary possibility.''
Maud Ellmann - Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor Emerita, University of Chicago
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