Research Catalog

Standard deviations : chance and the modern British novel

Title: Standard deviations : chance and the modern British novel / Leland Monk.
Author: Monk, Leland, 1953-
Publication: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 1993.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	PR888.F35 M66 1993	Off-site

Details

Description

199 pages; 23 cm.

Summary

Offering a new approach to narrative theory by arguing that chance is the unrepresentable Other of narrative, this book traces the theme of chance in novels by George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce. It also relates the novelistic treatment of chance to important historical currents in the philosophical and scientific understanding of chance, and it 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?
Beginning with Eliot, and with Middlemarch (1871-72) in particular, a new and distinctive interest in chance emerged in English fiction, and later novelists continued explicitly to pursue it in their work. Conrad's Chance (1913) clearly illustrates the textual and theoretical problems involved in the paradoxical attempt to depict chance in a narrative form that gives order and design to novelistic experience. It is not until Joyce's Ulysses (1911) that a narrative mode manages to approximate a kind of chance that is not altogether effaced by the novel's narrative construction. The author asserts that Joyce's work marks and defines a structural limit to the representation of chance in narrative, a limit that subsequent literary efforts do not, and probably cannot, go beyond.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [183]-192) and index.

Contents

Introduction: "Chance Is the Fool's Name for Fate" -- 1. Taking Chance Seriously: Philosophy, Science, the Novel -- 2. "A Practical Rebus": The Economy of Chance in Middlemarch -- 3. Playing Old Maid: Chance and the Proper Name -- 4. Tittles and Asymptotes: The Hyperbolic Function of Chance in Ulysses -- Conclusion: Chance and the Modern Novel -- Appendix: Chance in Hardy and James.

ISBN

0804721742
9780804721745

LCCN

92038358

OCLC

ocm27220710
27220710
SCSB-14508551

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library