The Possibility of Literature is an essential collection from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in contemporary literary studies. 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.

• Essays allow the reader to see the evolution of critical thinking through the first decades of the twenty-first century
• Addresses a range of writers and topics, from Melville to Ishiguro, and from the uses of beauty to the effects of rereading
• Across the range of the essays, the volume develops a new theory of literary possibility, elaborated through a series of close readings of individual writers and texts