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Uncertain Chances
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Uncertain Chances : Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

by Maurice S. Lee

Book Details

Format Hardback or Cased Book
ISBN-10 0199797579
ISBN-13 9780199797578
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Manufacture US
Country of Publication GB
Publication Date Jan 19th, 2012
Print length 256 Pages
Weight 474 grams
Dimensions 24.20 x 16.90 x 2.20 cms
Product Classification: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 History of the Americas Religion & science
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Maurice Lee's study illustrates how writers such as Poe, Melville, Douglass, Thoreau, Dickinson, and others participated in a broad intellectual and cultural shift in which Americans increasingly learned to live with the threatening and wonderful possibilities of chance.
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 struggled to control its power through weather forecasting, insurance, game theory, statistics, military science, and financial strategy.Uncertain Chances shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers faced questions of doubt and belief. Poe in his detective fiction critiques probabilistic methods. Melville in Moby-Dick and beyond struggles 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. 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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