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The role of chance changed in the nineteenth century, and American literature changed with it. Long dismissed as a nominal concept, chance was increasingly treated as a natural force to be managed but never mastered. New theories of chance sparked religious and philosophical controversies while revolutionizing the sciences as probabilistic methods spread from mathematics, economics, and sociology to physics and evolutionary biology. Chance also became more
visible in everyday life, as Americans attempted to control its power through weather forecasting, insurance policies, military strategy, and financial dealings.Uncertain Chances shows
how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers confronted questions of doubt and belief. Poe's detective fiction critiques probabilistic methods; Melville's works struggle to vindicate moral action under conditions of chance; Douglass and other African American authors fight against statistical racism; Thoreau learns to appreciate the play between nature's randomness and order; and Dickinson works faithfully to render poetically the affective experience of
chance-surprise. These and other nineteenth-century writers dramatize the inescapable dangers and wonderful possibilities of chance. Their writings even help to navigate extremes that remain with us
today--fundamentalism and relativism, determinism and chaos, terrorism and risk-management, the rational confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of modernity.
The role of chance changed in the nineteenth century, and American literature changed with it. Long dismissed as a nominal concept, chance was increasingly treated as a natural force to be managed but never mastered. New theories of chance sparked religious and philosophical controversies while revolutionizing the sciences as probabilistic methods spread from mathematics, economics, and sociology to physics and evolutionary biology. Chance also became more
visible in everyday life, as Americans attempted to control its power through weather forecasting, insurance policies, military strategy, and financial dealings.Uncertain Chances shows
how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers confronted questions of doubt and belief. Poe's detective fiction critiques probabilistic methods; Melville's works struggle to vindicate moral action under conditions of chance; Douglass and other African American authors fight against statistical racism; Thoreau learns to appreciate the play between nature's randomness and order; and Dickinson works faithfully to render poetically the affective experience of
chance-surprise. These and other nineteenth-century writers dramatize the inescapable dangers and wonderful possibilities of chance. Their writings even help to navigate extremes that remain with us
today--fundamentalism and relativism, determinism and chaos, terrorism and risk-management, the rational confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of modernity.
Introduction
Chapter One
Probably Poe
Chapter Two
Moby-Dick and the Opposite of Providence
Chapter Three
Doubting If Doubt Itself Be Doubting: After Moby-Dick
Chapter Four
Douglass' Long Run
Chapter Five
Roughly Thoreau
Chapter Six
Dickinson's Precarious Steps, Surprising Leaps, and Bounds
Coda
Lost Causes and the Civil War
Maurice S. Lee is Associate Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830-1860 and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass.
"[An] erudite...densely informative study." --The Emily Dickinson
International Society Bulletin
"Uncertain Chances is an adventurous, learned, and powerfully
argued inquiry into the manifold ways in which the ideas of chance,
indeterminacy, and probability energized the thinking of the most
prominent authors of the antebellum era. Over and again well-known
texts and authors appear in a surprising new light." --Eric
Sundquist, Johns Hopkins University
"Impressively wide-ranging and erudite, Uncertain Chances presents
an original account of how antebellum American writers used chance
to come to terms with doubt. Unlike the usual historical narrative,
Lee's study persuasively argues that nineteenth-century America's
exploration of the problem of doubt and the solution of probability
was well underway before the Civil War and the pragmatism of
Pierce, James, and Dewey." --Gregg Crane, University of
Michigan
"In this trenchant, wide-ranging, and witty book, Maurice Lee
analyzes the intellectual affinity between Poe, Melville, Thoreau,
Douglass, and Dickinson--who grappled with uncertainty--and the
later philosophical pragmatism of writers such as Charles Sanders
Peirce and William James. Showing continuity, not simply
disruption, across the Civil War, Lee rewrites nineteenth-century
American literary and intellectual history." --Samuel Otter,
University of
California, Berkeley
"Lee's theoretical sophistication and clear, direct prose proves a
winning combination that will likely satisfy all
readers...Essential." --Choice
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