Probability And Literary Form

Author : Douglas Lane Patey
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521254566
Total Pages : 398 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Probability and Literary Form written by Douglas Lane Patey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-04-12 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly original and penetrating study explores fundamental intellectual predispositions and concepts which underpin the literature and thought of the Augustan period in England. By examining in particular Augustan notions of probability and the way they provided a framework for thinking about and organising experience, Dr Patey reconstructs a characteristically eighteenth-century theory of literature which offers a much more satisfactory account of the work of Pope, Johnson, Fielding and others than the Romantic literary categories already in existence. The scope of this study is encyclopaedic and it will be an essential reference work for all scholars of eighteenth-century English literature and intellectual history, as well as historians of ideas.

Author : Rüdiger Campe
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804784663
Total Pages : 503 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Game of Probability written by Rüdiger Campe and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There exist literary histories of probability and scientific histories of probability, but it has generally been thought that the two did not meet. Campe begs to differ. Mathematical probability, he argues, took over the role of the old probability of poets, orators, and logicians, albeit in scientific terms. Indeed, mathematical probability would not even have been possible without the other probability, whose roots lay in classical antiquity. The Game of Probability revisits the seventeenth and eighteenth-century "probabilistic revolution," providing a history of the relations between mathematical and rhetorical techniques, between the scientific and the aesthetic. This was a revolution that overthrew the "order of things," notably the way that science and art positioned themselves with respect to reality, and its participants included a wide variety of people from as many walks of life. Campe devotes chapters to them in turn. Focusing on the interpretation of games of chance as the model for probability and on the reinterpretation of aesthetic form as verisimilitude (a critical question for theoreticians of that new literary genre, the novel), the scope alone of Campe's book argues for probability's crucial role in the constitution of modernity.

Author : Karin Kukkonen
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190050950
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Probability Designs written by Karin Kukkonen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Probability Designs develops a comprehensive account of the predictions and probabilities at play in literature, in particular novels. Novels, it is argued, provide readers with a designed sensory flow in their plots, style, and relation to other texts. The model traces, based on research in predictive processing, how this designed sensory flow revises readers' expectations and leads them to engage in exploratory thinking. The model is then embedded in a co-evolutionary account of how language, writing, and fictionality enable literary designer environments in which thought can be extended beyond the everyday. Literary form, as traced in probability designs, performs particular cognitive work in these designer environments"--

Author : Michael McKeon
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 1684484774
Total Pages : 179 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 2 written by Michael McKeon and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-14 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlightenment critics from Dryden through Johnson and Wordsworth conceived the modern view that art and especially literature entails a double reflection: a reflection of the world, and a reflection on the process by which that reflection is accomplished. Instead “neoclassicism” and “Augustanism” have been falsely construed as involving a one-dimensional imitation of classical texts and an unselfconscious representation of the world. In fact these Enlightenment movements adopted an oblique perspective that registers the distance between past tradition and its present reenactment, between representation and presence. Two modern movements, Romanticism and modernism, have appropriated as their own these innovations, which derive from Enlightenment thought. Both of these movements ground their error in a misreading of “imitation” as understood by Aristotle and his Enlightenment proponents. Rightly understood, neoclassical imitation, constitutively aware of the difference between what it knows and how it knows it, is an experimental inquiry that generates a range of prefixes—“counter-,” “mock-,” “anti-,” “neo-”—that mark formal degrees of its epistemological detachment. Romantic ideology has denied the role of the imagination in Enlightenment imitation, imposing on the eighteenth century a dichotomous periodization: duplication versus imagination, the mirror versus the lamp. Structuralist ideology has dichotomized narration and description, form and content, structure and history. Poststructuralist ideology has propounded for the novel a contradictory “novel tradition”—realism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism—whose stages both constitute a sequence and collapse it, each stage claiming the innovation of the stage that precedes it. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Author : Mary Poovey
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226675211
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Genres of the Credit Economy written by Mary Poovey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did banking, borrowing, investing, and even losing money—in other words, participating in the modern financial system—come to seem likeroutine activities of everydaylife? Genres of the Credit Economy addressesthis question by examining the history of financial instruments and representations of finance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Chronicling the process by which some of our most important conceptual categories were naturalized, Mary Poovey explores complex relationships among forms of writing that are not usually viewed together, from bills of exchange and bank checks, to realist novels and Romantic poems, to economic theory and financial journalism. Taking up all early forms of financial and monetarywriting, Poovey argues that these genres mediated for early modern Britons the operations of a market system organized around credit and debt. By arguing that genre is a critical tool for historical and theoretical analysis and an agent in the events that formed the modern world, Poovey offers a new way to appreciate the character of the credit economy and demonstrates the contribution historians and literary scholars can make to understanding its operations. Much more than an exploration of writing on and around money, Genres of the Credit Economy offers startling insights about the evolution of disciplines and the separation of factual and fictional genres.

Author : Leland Monk
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804766487
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Standard Deviations written by Leland Monk and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1994-03-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing works by George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, the author offers a new approach to narrative theory by showing how successive generations of novelists have used ever more powerful concepts of chance even though, he argues, chance is precisely what narrative cannot represent, since when it tries to do so it slips into the fated. He also relates the novelistic treatment of chance to important historical currents in the philosophical and scientific understanding of chance, and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the representation of chance in any narrative. The author asks three central questions: Why did British novelists become intensely interested in chance in the late nineteenth century? Why and how did they thematize it in their fiction? How did the novelistic treatment of chance contribute to innovations in narrative form?

Author : Lorna Hutson
Publisher : Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectu
ISBN 13 : 0199657106
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Circumstantial Shakespeare written by Lorna Hutson and published by Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectu. This book was released on 2015 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's characters are thought to be his greatest achievement--imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality, while his plots are said to be second-hand and careless of details of time and place. This view has survived the assaults of various literary theories and has even, surprisingly, been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare's characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical time and place. lCircumstantial Shakespeare explodes these venerable critical commonplaces. Drawing on sixteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, it reveals the importance of topics of circumstance (of Time, Place, and Motive, etc.) in the conjuring of compelling narratives and vivid mental images. 'Circumstances'--which we now think of as incalculable contingencies--were originally topics of forensic inquiry into human intention or passion. In drawing on the Roman forensic tradition of circumstantial proof, Shakespeare did not ignore time and place. His brilliant innovation was to use the topics of circumstance to imply offstage actions, times and places in terms of the motives and desires we attribute to the characters. His plays thus create both their own vivid and coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the unconscious feelings of characters inhabiting them. lCircumstantial Shakespeare offers new readings of lRomeo and Juliet, King Lear, Lucrece, Two Gentlemen of Verona and lMacbeth, as well as new interpretations of Sackville and Norton's lGorboduc and Beaumont and Fletcher's lThe Maid's Tragedy. It engages with eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism, contemporary Shakespeare criticism, semiotics of theatre, Roman forensic rhetoric, humanist pedagogy, the prehistory of modern probability, psychoanalytic criticism and sixteenth-century constitutional thought.

Author : Beat Affentranger
Publisher : Universal-Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1581120680
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Spectacle of the Growth of Knowledge and Swift's Satires on Science written by Beat Affentranger and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a revisionist study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satires on science with an emphasis on the writings of Jonathan Swift and, to a lesser degree, Samuel Butler and other satirists. To say, as some literary commentators do, that the satirists attacked only pseudo-scientists who failed to employ the empirical method properly is to beg a crucial question: how could the satirists possibly have distinguished the genuine scientist from the crank? By a failsafe set of Baconian principles perhaps? No, the matter is more complicated. I read the satiric literature on early modern science against a totally different understanding of what science is, how it came into being, and how it developed. Satire has a decided advantage over scientific discourse. It can rely on common sense; scientific discourse often cannot. There is always a counter-intuitive element in the genuinely new. New knowledge is in some ways always at odds with received assumptions of what is possible, reasonable, or probable. Satire on science, I suggest, can be seen as a systematic exploitation of that gap of plausibility. Natural philosophers of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century were keenly aware of their discursive disadvantage and at times even hesitated to publish their material. They feared the satirists and the wits, who they knew would find it easy to debunk their work on commonsense grounds. But commonsense and laughter are unreliable yardsticks for measuring scientific merit. Ironically, the satirists and the natural philosophers shared some of the most fundamental epistemological assumptions of early English empiricism, for instance, the stereotypical Baconian assumption that knowledge about nature would come to us unambiguously once the mind was freed from preconception and bias. It is an assumption about scientific method that is decidedly hostile towards speculative hypothesising. Indeed, the motto of the day was not bold speculation and learning from error, but avoiding error at all costs. Yet in practice, error (or what appeared to be erroneous) was of course frequent; for science is an essentially speculative enterprise. Natural philosophers of the early modern period, however, were embarrassed by their failures and tried to explain them away. The satirists, on the other hand, could prey on these mistakes and conclude that the work of the natural philosophers was purely speculative. The reason for this rigid, anti-speculative epistemological stance, I argue, was a religious one, having to do with the conception of nature as a divine book that could be read like Scripture. This conflation of the epistemological and the theological is especially obvious in Swift. In both his satirical and non-satirical writings, he is obsessed with proposing proper standards of interpretation, and with criticising those whom he thought had corrupted these standards. Dissenters and religious enthusiasts are taken to task for their misreading of Scripture, for their corrupt religious doctrine which they erroneously claim to be based on Scripture and reason. The natural philosophers are accused of some similar hermeneutic sin; only, they have committed their interpretive transgressions against the proper interpretive standard of the book of nature. Where the natural philosophers claim to have found a new, more accurate way of reading the book of nature, Swift, I argue, sees only mis-readings. Rhetorically, Swift's satires on religious dissent perpetuate the typically Tory High-Church insinuation of sectarian and heretical sexual promiscuity. In his satires on science, Swift makes the same insinuation with respect to natural philosophers, most vividly so in A Tale of a Tub and the flying island of Laputa. The study concludes with a fresh look at Swift's rational horses in part four of Gulliver's Travels.

Author : David Duff
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191610208
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Romanticism and the Uses of Genre written by David Duff and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging and original book reappraises the role of genre, and genre theory, in British Romanticism. Analyzing numerous examples from 1760 to 1830, David Duff examines the generic innovations and experiments which propel the Romantic 'revolution in literature', but also the fascination with archaic forms such as the ballad, sonnet, and romance, whose revival and transformation make Romanticism a 'retro' movement as well as a revolutionary one. The tension between the drives to 'make it old' and to 'make it new' generates one of the most dynamic phases in the history of literature, whose complications are played out in the critical writing of the period as well as its creative literature. Incorporating extensive research on classification systems and reception history as well as on literary forms themselves, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre demonstrates how new ideas about the role and status of genre influenced not only authors but also publishers, editors, reviewers, and readers. The focus is on poetry, but a wider spectrum of genres is considered, a central theme being the relationship - hierarchical, competitive, combinatory - between genres. Among the topics addressed are generic primitivism and forgery; Enlightenment theory and the 'cognitive turn'; the impact of German transcendental aesthetics; organic and anti-organic form; the role of genre in the French Revolution debate; the poetics of the fragment; and the theory and practice of genre-mixing. Unprecedented in its scope and detail, this important book establishes a new way of reading Romantic literature which brings into focus for the first time its tangled relationship with genre.

Author : Marshall Brown
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822322672
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Eighteenth-century Literary History written by Marshall Brown and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on eighteenth-century literature from MLQ.