000 02046nam a22002177a 4500
003 JGU
005 20230110094805.0
008 230110b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020 _a9781503629769
_qhbk.
040 _beng
_cJGU
041 _aeng
100 _aChoi, Tina Young,
_91637478
_eauthor
245 _aVictorian contingencies :
_bexperiments in literature, science, and play /
_cTina Young Choi.
260 _aStanford :
_bStanford University Press,
_c2022.
520 _a"Contingency is not just a feature of modern politics, finance, and culture―by thinking contingently, nineteenth-century Britons rewrote familiar narratives and upended forgone conclusions. Victorian Contingencies shows how scientists, novelists, and consumers engaged in new formal and material experiments with cause and effect, past and present, that actively undermined routine certainties. Tina Young Choi traces contingency across a wide range of materials and media, from newspaper advertisements and children's stories to well-known novels, scientific discoveries, technological innovations. She shows how Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin reinvented geological and natural histories as spaces for temporal and causal experimentation, while the nascent insurance industry influenced Charles Babbage's computational designs for a machine capable of responding to a contingent future. Choi pairs novelists George Eliot and Lewis Carroll with physicist James Clerk Maxwell, demonstrating how they introduced possibility and probability into once-assured literary and scientific narratives. And she explores the popular board games and pre-cinematic visual entertainments that encouraged Victorians to navigate a world made newly uncertain. By locating contingency within these cultural contexts, this book invites a deep and multidisciplinary reassessment of the longer histories of causality, closure, and chance."--
650 _aManners and customs
650 _aAmusements
_9926691
999 _c3053129
_d3053129