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  3. The Art of Uncertainty
  • Cited by 3
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      February 2024
      March 2024
      ISBN:
      9781009436120
      9781009436113
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009436120
      Dimensions:
      (229 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.66kg, 346 Pages
      Dimensions:
      Weight & Pages:
      • Subjects:
      Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
      Series:
      Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
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    Subjects:
    Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
    Series:
    Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
    Information

    Book description

    The Victorian novel developed unique forms of reasoning under uncertainty-of thinking, judging, and acting in the face of partial knowledge and unclear outcome. George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, and later Joseph Conrad drew on science, mathematics, philosophy, and the law to articulate a phenomenology of uncertainty against emergent models of prediction and decision-making. In imaginative explorations of unsure reasoning, hesitant judgment, and makeshift action, these novelists cultivated distinctive responses to uncertainty as intellectual concern and cultural disposition, participating in the knowledge work of an era shaped by numerical approaches to the future. Reading for uncertainty yields a rich account of the dynamics of thinking and acting, a fresh understanding of realism as a genre of the probable, and a vision of literary-critical judgment as provisional and open-ended. Daniel Williams spotlights the value of literary art in a present marked by models and technologies of prediction.

    Awards

    Short-listed, 2025 Book Prize, British Society for Literature and Science

    Reviews

    ‘A strong addition to the series, and it will be stimulating for advanced readers who enjoy studying the evolving form of the novel … Highly recommended.’

    S. A. Parker Source: CHOICE

    ‘This is a forensically detailed and ambitious book, spanning, and often juggling richly, several disciplines at once.’

    Alicia Rix Source: The Times Literary Supplement

    ‘The reader will find exceptionally careful and sensitive analyses of individual novels, as well as suggestive accounts of thematically-related philosophical and psychological problems that concerned the Victorian novelists on whom the book focuses.’

    Amanda Auerbach Source: Nineteenth-Century Contexts

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