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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
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Literature After Euclid - The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (Hardcover)
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Literature After Euclid - The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (Hardcover)
Series: Haney Foundation Series
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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What if historical fiction were understood as a disfiguring of
calculus? Or poems enacting the formation and breakdown of
community as expositions of irrational numbers? What if, in other
words, literary texts possessed a kind of mathematical unconscious?
The persistence of the rhetoric of "two cultures," one scientific,
the other humanities-based, obscures the porous border and
productive relationship that has long existed between literature
and mathematics. In eighteenth-century Scottish universities,
geometry in particular was considered one of the humanities;
anchored in philosophy, it inculcated what we call critical
thinking. But challenges to classical geometry within the realm of
mathematics obligated Scottish geometers to become more creative in
their defense of the traditional discipline; and when literary
writers and philosophers incorporated these mathematical problems
into their own work, the results were not only ingenious but in
some cases pioneering. Literature After Euclid tells the story of
the creative adaptation of geometry in Scotland during and after
the long eighteenth century. It argues that diverse attempts in
literature and philosophy to explain or even emulate the geometric
achievements of Isaac Newton and others resulted in innovations
that modify our understanding of descriptive and bardic poetry, the
aesthetics of the picturesque, and the historical novel. Matthew
Wickman's analyses of these innovations in the work of Walter
Scott, Robert Burns, James Thomson, David Hume, Thomas Reid, and
other literati change how we perceive the Scottish Enlightenment
and the later, modernist ethos that purportedly relegated the
"classical" Enlightenment to the dustbin of history. Indeed, the
Scottish Enlightenment's geometric imagination changes how we see
literary history itself.
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