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.

'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