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Uncertain Chances - Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Hardcover, New)
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Uncertain Chances - Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Hardcover, New)
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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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