The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics

by Robert Tubbs (Editor), Alice Jenkins (Editor), Nina Engelhardt (Editor)

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 shastic 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/].

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030554804
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	12/31/2020
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	623
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

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).

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: Shastics 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

Editorial 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)

From the Publisher