Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British NovelAnalyzing 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? |
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aesthetic aleatory atomistic atoms Barral Bloom British novel Bulstrode Bulstrode's calls Captain Anthony causality chance in narrative chance in Ulysses chapter character clinamen coincidence Conrad's consider Darwin's Dedalus Defoe Defoe's Democritean Derrida determined effaced Elijah Epicurean Epicurus experience fate father fiction figure Finnegans Wake Flora Freud Fyne George Eliot happen Hardy's Ibid Jacques Derrida James James Joyce James's John Raffles Joseph Conrad Joyce Joyce's Lacan letter linguistic literary literary realism logic Lucretius Marlow metaphysical Middlemarch moral narrative form narrator nature novelistic observes origins paternity play plot Powell Powell's primal scene problematic proper name Providence providential Purloined Letter quantum Raffles's random reading realism relation representation of chance Robinson Crusoe scientific sense sexual Shakespeare Simon Dedalus Stephen story Strether structure subatomic suggests swerve thematics theme theory things thinking about chance Thomas Hardy throwaway tion transubstantial treatment of chance tyche Ulysses Vargish Victorian word writing