The Art of Uncertainty: Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

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. Cover Half-title Series information Title page Imprints page Epigraph Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The Bounds of Uncertainty The Highs and Lows of Number Chance Collisions Only for the Most Part Likely Stories Part I Provisional Judgments Chapter 1 Indecision Theory: Hesitation and Comparison in Eliot The Vanity of Induction The Physiology of Hesitation My Minds Are Not My Own Pathologies of the Will Comparison, Our Precious Guide Fervent Particulars Chapter 2 Unproven Verdicts: Collins and Legal Uncertainty That Caledonian Medium Quid Styles of Search and Detection Unproven at Trial Investigating by Numbers The Puzzle to a Solution Reading without Proving Part II Probable Realisms Chapter 3 Worlds Otherwise: Thackeray and the Counterfactual Imagination Demons of Fact Thinking Up and Down Counterfactuals in Vanity Fair Credite Posteri! Memory's Roundabout Hypothesis as Late Style Chapter 4 Approximations: Serial and Composite Thinking in Hardy Serial Thinking Chance Materialized Countermoves Some Versions of Subjectivism An Obsolescent Face Composite Thinking An Art of Conjecture Coarse Rivalry, Smooth Ciphering Something in the Air Attrition, Overlay, and the View from Above Probable Realism Coda: Outside Chance, or The Afterlife of Uncertainty Notes Bibliography Index