The prosthetic imagination : a history of the novel as artificial life / Peter Boxall. Boxall, Peter, author.

Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2020.

xi, 411 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

"What is the relation between the mimetic and the prosthetic? How does the process of making pictures or likenesses of reality (in paint, in film, in prose) relate to our fashioning of artificial bodies, the manufacturing of the plastic forms with which we augment and enhance our naked extension into the world, what Freud calls the mere 'inch of nature' which we are given? This question was given a rather palpable form for me when, as part of my initial preparation for writing this book, I spent some time with a prosthetic surgeon who specialises in facial prosthetics. The surgeon - Charles - took me to a room in which there were a number of wooden cabinets, where he stored facial prostheses in drawers. He wanted to show me some of them, he said, in order to give me a sense of the range of different kinds of prostheses he made. He had these faces in his possession because, as his patients aged or grew, he regularly updated their prostheses.