Book ID: CBB161989848

Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science, and Play (2021)

unapi

Choi, Tina Young (Author)


Stanford University Press


Publication Date: 2021
Physical Details: 264
Language: English

Contingency is not just a feature of modern politics, finance, and culture―by thinking contingently, nineteenth-century Britons rewrote familiar narratives and upended forgone conclusions. Victorian Contingencies shows how scientists, novelists, and consumers engaged in new formal and material experiments with cause and effect, past and present, that actively undermined routine certainties. Tina Young Choi traces contingency across a wide range of materials and media, from newspaper advertisements and children's stories to well-known novels, scientific discoveries, technological innovations. She shows how Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin reinvented geological and natural histories as spaces for temporal and causal experimentation, while the nascent insurance industry influenced Charles Babbage's computational designs for a machine capable of responding to a contingent future. Choi pairs novelists George Eliot and Lewis Carroll with physicist James Clerk Maxwell, demonstrating how they introduced possibility and probability into once-assured literary and scientific narratives. And she explores the popular board games and pre-cinematic visual entertainments that encouraged Victorians to navigate a world made newly uncertain. By locating contingency within these cultural contexts, this book invites a deep and multidisciplinary reassessment of the longer histories of causality, closure, and chance.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB161989848/

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Authors & Contributors
Talbot, Chris
Secord, James A.
Ratcliff, Jessica
Opitz, Donald Luke
Nickelsen, Kärin
Naylor, Simon
Concepts
Science and society
Science and culture
Chance
Experiments and experimentation
Science and literature
Evolution
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century, early
17th century
Places
Great Britain
France
Guyana; British Guiana
Virginia (U.S.)
London (England)
United States
Institutions
Royal Geographical Society
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