The Value of the Novel

Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His books include Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism and Twenty-First Century-Fiction: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, 2013). He has also edited and co-edited a number of collections, including Thinking Poetry.

• 1. The novel voice; 2. Is this really realism?; 3. The novel body; 4. Making time matter; 5. The novel, justice and the law.

'The Value of the Novel is a triumph. Peter Boxall offers us a sweeping, stimulating revision of critical and literary history that looks forward to the novel's future even as it looks no less to its past. And his book is as moving as it is persuasive, because of the quality of its analysis and of Boxall's writing. This volume, the first of a new series, sets the highest standard for subsequent installments. Boxall re-establishes criticism as a comprehensive exploratory dialogue about every aspect of the art and rhetoric of fiction. His work reminds us of the value of the intellectual distinction that is, as much as the value of the novel, our common pursuit.' Robert Caserio, Pennsylvania State University