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Author Williams, Daniel, 1983- author.

Title The art of uncertainty : probable realism and the Victorian novel / Daniel Williams
Published Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2024
©2024

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 324 pages) : illustrations
Series Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture
Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture.
Contents Cover -- Half-title -- Series information -- Title page -- Imprints page -- Epigraph -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Bounds of Uncertainty -- The Highs and Lows of Number -- Chance Collisions -- Only for the Most Part -- Likely Stories -- Part I Provisional Judgments -- Chapter 1 Indecision Theory: Hesitation and Comparison in Eliot -- The Vanity of Induction -- The Physiology of Hesitation -- My Minds Are Not My Own -- Pathologies of the Will -- Comparison, Our Precious Guide -- Fervent Particulars
Chapter 2 Unproven Verdicts: Collins and Legal Uncertainty -- That Caledonian Medium Quid -- Styles of Search and Detection -- Unproven at Trial -- Investigating by Numbers -- The Puzzle to a Solution -- Reading without Proving -- Part II Probable Realisms -- Chapter 3 Worlds Otherwise: Thackeray and the Counterfactual Imagination -- Demons of Fact -- Thinking Up and Down -- Counterfactuals in Vanity Fair -- Credite Posteri! Memory's Roundabout -- Hypothesis as Late Style -- Chapter 4 Approximations: Serial and Composite Thinking in Hardy -- Serial Thinking -- Chance Materialized -- Countermoves
Some Versions of Subjectivism -- An Obsolescent Face -- Composite Thinking -- An Art of Conjecture -- Coarse Rivalry, Smooth Ciphering -- Something in the Air -- Attrition, Overlay, and the View from Above -- Probable Realism -- Coda: Outside Chance, or The Afterlife of Uncertainty -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary Daniel Williams reveals how George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad drew on science, mathematics, philosophy, and the law to cultivate responses to uncertainty as intellectual and cultural concern, and how they both participated in and resisted the ideas of a profoundly numerical age
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on March 13, 2024)
Subject English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
Uncertainty in literature.
Realism in literature.
Genre/Form Electronic books
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781009436106
1009436104
9781009436120
1009436120