Description
Book SynopsisWhat if historical fiction were understood as a disfiguring of calculus? Or poems enacting the formation and breakdown of community as expositions of irrational numbers? What if, in other words, literary texts possessed a kind of mathematical unconscious?
The persistence of the rhetoric of two cultures, one scientific, the other humanities-based, obscures the porous border and productive relationship that has long existed between literature and mathematics. In eighteenth-century Scottish universities, geometry in particular was considered one of the humanities; anchored in philosophy, it inculcated what we call critical thinking. But challenges to classical geometry within the realm of mathematics obligated Scottish geometers to become more creative in their defense of the traditional discipline; and when literary writers and philosophers incorporated these mathematical problems into their own work, the results were not only ingenious but in some cases pioneering.
Liter
Trade Review
"Literature After Euclid will be a significant and controversial book, bringing together important issues in literary and intellectual history with powerful theoretical questions about the relation between aesthetic and scientific disciplines, the shape and constitution of literary history, and the conception of literary form. It is an original, accomplished, and frequently brilliant work." * Ian Duncan, University of California, Berkeley *
"Literature After Euclid poses fundamental questions about the relationship of space and time in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought, and offers an array of fertile, exciting insights." * Alice Jenkins, University of Glasgow *
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART I. THEOREM: SHAPES OF TIME
Chapter 1. Scotland's Age of Union: Toward an Elongated Eighteenth Century
Chapter 2. Scott's Shapes
PART II. SCHOLIUM: SCENES OF WRITING
Chapter 3. "Wild Geometry" and the Picturesque
Chapter 4. Burns After Reading, or On the Poetic Fold Between Shape and Number
PART III. LOCUS: MEASURING THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT ACROSS HISTORY
Chapter 5. The Newtonian Turn/Turning from Newton: James Thomson's Poetic Calculus
Chapter 6. A Long and Shapely Eighteenth Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index
