Using a short work by Jane Gallop on what the “theoretical” death of an author means when one is faced with an actual death of a writer one is writing on, the Epilogue argues that we have now entered an age in which an ethics of responsibility dictates that the death of the author is not just a theoretical problematic but one where both theory, personal loss, and mourning are brought together. The Epilogue thinks through the literary death of the writer. It is argued through close readings of three of his final works that Naipaul’s literary death coincides with the death of his first wife Patricia Naipaul in 1996. His final three major works are read as works symptomatic of a writer no longer in control of his great literary gifts. When the aesthetic impulse dies, the “author” dies too, but in the case of a great writer, which Naipaul is, before his “death” he had created worlds that no other writer had created. That achievement, singular and original, has to be acknowledged insofar as it now enables us to rethink and reconceptualize what it means to be a writer of “world literature.”

This chapter makes a case for the value of examining magical realism’s many intersections with religion, a topic that has been undertreated in Anglophone scholarship. While the global corpus of magical realist literature has drawn from countless religious resource bases, faith in magical realism has been thought of almost exclusively as indigenous faiths for reasons this chapter explores. In contrast, the mode has been considered as especially antithetical to Christianity, even though we can trace the latter within some of the earliest self-professed magical realist narratives, and many subsequent ones. It is in direct response to these dual misconceptions that this chapter focuses on magical realist narratives that utilize Christianity and narratives that utilize indigenous religious, showing, for example, how we might see within both the use of common narrative strategies and effects. By addressing these two poles, the author encourages an open understanding of the mode’s potential relation to any religious resource base. The chapter concludes that while the term 'magic' itself is freighted, the form can be amicable towards religious practitioners and sensibilities. We see this in a couple of ways. First, magical realism’s structural configuration can be – and is – understood as pointing to a multidimensional human world. Second, the mode can provide a phenomenological account of religion, or an experience of belief from the inside.

This chapter explores the relation between the novel form and the emergence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism and posthumanism in the second half of the twentieth century. It begins with an analysis of the relation between the prosthetic and the simulacral, under postmodern conditions, and with the technological revolution associated with the advent of computing. The novel, it suggests, from Orwell to Brooke-Rose, is involved in a difficult relationship with postmodernism, one which gives expression to its possibilities, while also seeking to resist its erosion of the materiality of our cultures and environments. It traces a strand of experimental realism in the postwar novel that is at odds with the terms in which we have conceived of postmodern fiction. It then goes on to read two of the novelists who are associated with the postmodern novel – Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison – to suggest that one can detect a persistent opposition in their work between the simulacrum and the prosthetic, one which helps us see past some of the contradictions that are the result of our existing accounts of postmodern politics and aesthetics.