The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life

ISBN-13: 9781108836487 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 422 str.

Peter Boxall (University of Sussex)

Opis

This book offers an account of the historical development of the novel as a means of imagining and fashioning our bodies and our environments, in order to suggest that prose fiction can help us to understand new forms of artificial life as they are emerging in the twenty-first century.

Recenzje

'… 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

Spis treści

Introduction. Mimesis and prosthesis; Part I. The Body and the Early Modern State: From More to Cavendish: 1. Fiction, the body and the state; Part II. The Colonial Body: From Behn to Goethe: 2. Economies of scale from Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott; 3. Organic aesthetics from Richardson to Goethe; Part III. The Manufactured Body: From Wollstonecraft to Stoker: 4. The dead hand: realism and biomaterial in the nineteenth-century novel; 5. Strange affinity: Gothic prosthetics from Shelley to Stoker; Part IV. The Modernist Body: From James to Beckett: 6. A duplication of consciousness: realism, modernism and prosthetic self-fashioning; 7. All twined together: prosthetic modernism from Proust to Beckett; Part V. The Posthuman Body: From Orwell to Atwood: 8. Prosthetics and simulacra: the postmodern novel; 9. Prosthetic worlds in the twenty-first-century novel.