About the Book
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/].
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Relationships and Connections between Literature and Mathematics, Nina Engelhardt, Robert Tubbs.- 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.- 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.- 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.- 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.- 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.
