Peter Boxall's The Prosthetic Imagination is perhaps best understood as a work of conceptual synthesis. Prosthesis—the appendage of an inanimate body to help support the functioning of a living organism—might be Boxall's chosen subject. But his method is less prosthetic than Frankensteinian: Boxall (re)animates a theory of the novel whose component pieces have all had a prior life before him, a life in which they functioned well on their own but were endowed with much less existential and philosophical grandeur.
To make this observation is by no means a criticism, nor do I intend it as such. Boxall has had his finger on the pulse of novel theory for a long time. In The Prosthetic Imagination, he gathers up and breathes new life into the collective thinking of which he has been a part since his first book. Thinking about hypercanonical Western novels is an activity which I, at...
