Overview

This handbook features essays written by both literary scholars and mathematicians that examine multiple facets of the connections between literature and mathematics. These connections range from mathematics and poetic meter to mathematics and modernism to mathematics as literature. Some chapters focus on a single author, such as mathematics and Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, or Charles Dickens, while others consider a mathematical topic common to two or more authors, such as squaring the circle, chaos theory, Newton’s calculus, or stochastic processes. With appeal for scholars and students in literature, mathematics, cultural history, and history of mathematics, this important volume aims to introduce the range, fertility, and complexity of the connections between mathematics, literature, and literary theory.  Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via [link.springer.com|http://link.springer.com/].

Full Product Details

Author:   Robert Tubbs ,  Alice Jenkins ,  Nina Engelhardt
Publisher:   Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Imprint:   Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Edition:   1st ed. 2021
Weight:   0.979kg
ISBN:  

9783030554804

ISBN 10:   3030554805
Pages:   623
Publication Date:   01 January 2022
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Relationships and Connections between Literature and Mathematics Nina Engelhardt, Robert Tubbs   Part 1. Mathematics in Literature   2. Numbered Possibilities: Chaucer and the Evolution of Late-Medieval Mathematics David Baker   3. Mercantile Arithmetic and Financial Profit in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass Joe Jarrett   4. Mathematics and Poetry in the Nineteenth Century Daniel Brown   5. Non-normative Euclideans: Victorian Literature and the Untaught Geometer Alice Jenkins   6. Mathematical Contrariness in George Eliot's novels Derek Ball   7. Mathematics in Russian Avant-garde Literature Anke Niederbudde   8. Uses of Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry in Fiction Alex Kasman   9. Mathematical Clinamen in the Encyclopedic Novel: Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace Stuart Taylor   10. Squaring the Circle: A Literary History Robert Tubbs     Part 2. Mathematics and Literary Forms   11. Mathematics and Poetic Meter Jason Hall   12. Randomizing Form: Stochastics and Combinatorics in Postwar Literature Alison James   13. Oulipian Mathematics Warren Motte   14. Mathematics and Dramaturgy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Liliane Campos   15. Nonlinearity, Writing, and Creative Process Ira Livingston     Part 3. Mathematics, Modernism, and Literature   16. Mathematics and Modernism Nina Engelhardt   17. Mathematics in German Literature: Paradoxes of Infinity Howard Pollack-Milgate           18. Ghosts of Departed Quantities: Samuel Beckett and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Chris Ackerley   19. 'Numbers have such pretty names': Gertrude Stein's Mathematical Poetics Anne Brubaker   20. Modernist Literature and Modernist Mathematics I: Mathematics and Composition, with Mallarmé, Heisenberg, and Derrida Arkady Plotnitsky   21. Modernist Literature and Modernist Mathematics II: Mathematics and Event, with Mallarmé, Gödel, and Badiou Arkady Plotnitsky     Part 4. Relations between Literature and Mathematics   22. King Lear, Without the Mathematics: From Reading Mathematics to Reading Mathematically Travis D. Williams   23. Newton, Burns, and a Poetics of Figure: Toward a Prehistory of Consilience Matthew Wickman   24. The Mathematics of Associationism in Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy Aaron Ottinger   25. Romantic Parts and Wholes, Statistical and Literary Margaret Kolb   26. “Colours of the Dying Dolphins”: Nineteenth-Century Defences of Literature and Mathematics Imogen Forbes-Macphail   27. Combinatorial Characters Andrea Henderson   28. Datelines Steven Connor   29. The Metaphor as an Equation: Ezra Pound and the Similitudes of Representation Jocelyn Rodal       Part 5. Mathematics as Literature   30. Rehearsing in the Margins: Mathematical Print and Mathematical Learning in the Early Modern Period Benjamin Wardhaugh   31. Mathematics, Narrative, and Temporality Marcus Tomalin   32. A Cognitive and Quantitative Approach to Mathematical Concretization Marc Alexander  

Reviews

This is an astonishing, wonderful book, for it offers a much wider panorama of the connection between literature and mathematics than thought possible ... . there is much more in this very stimulating book. (Victor V. Pambuccian, zbMATH 1475.00017, 2022)

“This is an astonishing, wonderful book, for it offers a much wider panorama of the connection between literature and mathematics than thought possible … . there is much more in this very stimulating book.” (Victor V. Pambuccian, zbMATH 1475.00017, 2022)

Author Information

Robert Tubbs is Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. He has published numerous research papers and four books, including What is a Number? (2009) and Mathematics in Twentieth Century Literature and Art (2014), both on mathematics and the humanities.  Alice Jenkins is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her research centers on the emergence of the knowledge economy in the nineteenth century. Publications include Space and the 'March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences, 1815-1850 (2007). She is co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine series. Nina Engelhardt is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. She is author of the monograph Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics (2018) and co-editor of Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction (Palgrave 2019).

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