Palgrave macmillan, Springer, 2021. — 895 p. — ISBN 978-3-030-55477-4.
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 stochastic 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.
Introduction: Relationships and Connections Between Literature and Mathematics
Mathematics in LiteratureNumbered Possibilities: Chaucer and the Evolution of Late-Medieval Mathematics
Mercantile Arithmetic, Financial Profit, and Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass
Mathematics and Poetry in the Nineteenth Century
Non-Normative Euclideans: Victorian Literature and the Untaught Geometer
Mathematical Contrariness in George Eliot’s Novels
Mathematics in Russian Avant-Garde Literature
Uses of Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry in Fiction
Mathematical Clinamen in the Encyclopedic Novel: Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace
Squaring the Circle: A Literary History
Mathematics and Literary FormsMathematics and Poetic Meter
Randomizing Form: Stochastics and Combinatorics in Postwar Literature
Oulipian Mathematics
Mathematics and Dramaturgy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Nonlinearity, Writing, and Creative Process
Mathematics, Modernism, and LiteratureMathematics and Modernism
Mathematics in German Literature: Paradoxes of Infinity
The Ghosts of Departed Quantities: Samuel Beckett and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
“Numbers Have Such Pretty Names”: Gertrude Stein’s Mathematical Poetics
Modernist Literature and Modernist Mathematics I: Mathematics and Composition, with Mallarmé, Heisenberg, and Derrida
Modernist Literature and Modernist Mathematics II: Mathematics and Event, with Mallarmé, Gödel, and Badiou
Relations Between Literature and MathematicsKing Lear, Without the Mathematics: From Reading Mathematics to Reading Mathematically
Newton, Burns, and a Poetics of Figure: Toward a Prehistory of Consilience
The Mathematics of Associationism in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
Romantic Parts and Wholes, Statistical and Literary
“Colours of the Dying Dolphin”: Nineteenth-Century Defenses of Literature and Mathematics
Combinatorial Characters Datelines
The Metaphor as an Equation: Ezra Pound and the Similitudes of Representation
Mathematics as LiteratureRehearsing in the Margins: Mathematical Print and Mathematical Learning in the Early Modern Period
Mathematics, Narrative, and Temporality
A Cognitive and Quantitative Approach to Mathematical Concretization