Overview

This book delivers an innovative critical approach to better understand U.S. fiction of the information age, and argues that in the last eighty years, fiction has become increasingly concerned with its representations of mathematical ideas, images, and practices. In so doing, this book provides a fuller, transnational account of the place of mathematics in understanding mathematically informed novels. Literature and science studies have acknowledged and situated historical points of cultural crossover; by emphasising mathematics within this larger intellectual context – and not as an unlikely and alien adjunct to post-war culture – this monograph clarifies how mathematically informed postmodern fictions work in a cognate fashion to other fields undergoing structuralist revolutions. This is especially evident in fiction by the key, mathematically-literate Postmodern authors upon whom this study focuses, namely, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, through which recent the technological revolutions, facilitated by mathematics, manifest in cultural discourse.

Full Product Details

9783031486739

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Taylor’s study is rich with sources that are potent not only for understanding the book’s central points but also help to appreciate the scope of the interplay between mathematics and literature, history, sociology and general cultural development. ... The book is a veritable contribution to the study of literature and mathematics … ."" (Anatolii Kozlov, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, May 2, 2025)

Author Information

Stuart J. Taylor is a Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland, UK.

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