Maurice S. Lee

Uncertain Chances (eBook, PDF)

Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

The role of chance changed in the nineteenth century, and American literature changed with it. Long dismissed as a nominal concept, chance was increasingly treated as a natural force to be managed but never mastered. New theories of chance sparked religious and philosophical controversies while revolutionizing the sciences as probabilistic methods spread from mathematics, economics, and sociology to physics and evolutionary biology. Chance also became more visible in everyday life, as Americans attempted to control its power through weather forecasting, insurance policies, military strategy, and financial dealings. Uncertain Chances shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers confronted questions of doubt and belief. Poe's detective fiction critiques probabilistic methods; Melville's works struggle to vindicate moral action under conditions of chance; Douglass and other African American authors fight against statistical racism; Thoreau learns to appreciate the play between nature's randomness and order; and Dickinson works faithfully to render poetically the affective experience of chance-surprise. These and other nineteenth-century writers dramatize the inescapable dangers and wonderful possibilities of chance. Their writings even help to navigate extremes that remain with us today--fundamentalism and relativism, determinism and chaos, terrorism and risk-management, the rational confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of modernity.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 336
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. Januar 2012
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780199797677
• Artikelnr.: 38138149

Autorenporträt

Maurice S. Lee is Associate Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830-1860 and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction
Chapter One
Probably Poe
Chapter Two
Moby-Dick and the Opposite of Providence
Chapter Three
Doubting If Doubt Itself Be Doubting: After Moby-Dick
Chapter Four
Douglass' Long Run
Chapter Five
Roughly Thoreau
Chapter Six
Dickinson's Precarious Steps, Surprising Leaps, and Bounds
Coda
Lost Causes and the Civil War