"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)
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: Stochastics 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
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).
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.
Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via [link.springer.com|http://link.springer.com/].