The Victorian novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and others have been characterized as having lapsed plotlines, endless digressions, and an obsessive devotion to background characters. But, as Henry James asked, what do these elements mean artistically?
The Physics of Possibility answers this question by charting a thirty-year span when the mathematics of chance transformed the physical sciences of the mid-nineteenth century. Michael Tondre shows that what might be considered literary "weaknesses" actually reflect a reorientation of the basic formal categories of object, action, and setting in investigations of chance within Victorian physical science and mathematics. Novelists cultivated a common vernacular with this new science, inventing shared doctrines of realism.
Using an interdisciplinary method grounded in close readings of specific texts and archival materials, and drawing on science studies, philosophy, object theories, and cultural history, The Physics of Possibility interprets innovations across different forms of writing, tracing a trajectory from a handful of mathematically -minded savants in 1850 to a shared understanding of fiction as a vehicle devoted to the production of possible worlds.
Michael Tondre is Assistant Professor of English at Stony Brook University.
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