Support H-Net | Buy Books Here | Help Support the NBN and NBN en Español on Patreon | Visit New Books Network en Español!
In
Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (Ohio State UP, 2020), Adam
Grener advances a new approach to evaluating realism in fiction by
arguing that nineteenth-century literary realism shifted attention to
the historical and social dimensions of probability in the period’s
literature. In an era in which probability was increasingly defined
by statistical concepts of aggregation and abstraction, the realist
writers discussed here turned to chance and improbability to address
representational problems of contingency, difference, and
scale.
Contemporary thinking about probability came to
recognize the variability and even randomness of the world while also
discovering how patterns and order reemerge at scale. Reading chance
as a tension between randomness and order, Grener shows how novels by
Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and
Thomas Hardy resist the demands of probabilistic representation and
develop strategies for capturing cultural particularity and
historical transformation. These authors served their visions of
realism by tactically embracing improbability in the form of
coincidences, fatalism, supernaturalism, and luck. Understanding this
strategy helps us to appreciate how realist novels work to
historicize the social worlds and experiences they represent and asks
us to rethink the very foundation of realism.
Su Min Kim is an independent scholar of nineteenth-century British literature. Her research focuses on the intersections of literary and mathematical history in nineteenth-century Europe. She is also a freelance writer and polyglot. For more conversations on her research, writing, and foreign languages, contact her at sumin.kim@u.nus.edu.
Su Min Kim is an independent scholar of nineteenth-century British literature. Her research focuses on the intersections of literary and mathematical history in nineteenth-century Europe. She is also a freelance writer and polyglot. For more conversations on her research, writing, and foreign languages, contact her at sumin.kim@u.nus.edu.