Peter Boxall 'The Possibility of Literature' with Abigail Williams

The Possibility of Literature

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.

Peter Boxall

Peter Boxall is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has written a number of books on the novel, including Twenty-First-Century Fiction and The Value of the Novel. He is editor of Textual Practice, and series editor of ‘Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture’. His book, The Prosthetic Imagination, came out with CUP in 2020.

Abigail Williams

Professor Abigail Williams is the Associate Head of Research and Innovation for the Humanities Division. Working with the divisional research support and impact teams and TORCH she leads on strategic oversight of research activity across the nine faculties and departments. She is Professor of English Literature and Lord White Tutorial Fellow at St Peter’s College. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century literature, politics, and the history of the book, with a recent focus on historical and contemporary readers and reading practices.

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