The Art of Uncertainty
Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel

Daniel Williams shows how, in a profoundly numerical age, Victorian novels imagined thought and action in the face of uncertainty.

Daniel Williams (Author)

9781009436113, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 March 2024

346 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.5 cm, 0.66 kg

'The reader will find exceptionally careful and sensitive analyses of individual novels, as well as suggestive accounts of thematically-related philosophical and psychological problems that concerned the Victorian novelists on whom the book focuses.' Amanda Auerbach, Nineteenth-Century Contexts

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.

Introduction: The Bounds of Uncertainty
Part I. Provisional Judgments: 1. Indecision Theory: Hesitation and Comparison in Eliot
2. Unproven Verdicts: Collins and Legal Uncertainty
Part II. Probable Realisms: 3. Worlds Otherwise: Thackeray and the Counterfactual Imagination
4. Approximations: Serial and Composite Thinking in Hardy
Coda: Outside Chance, or, the Afterlife of Uncertainty.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]