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Against all odds :The sway of chance in eighteenth-century Britain (Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding).

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Against all odds :
Reminder of title:	The sway of chance in eighteenth-century Britain (Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding).
Author:	Molesworth, Jesse Marti.
Description:	285 p.
Notes:	Advisers: Terry Castle; John Bender.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 64-09, Section: A, page: 3307.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International64-09A.
Subject:	Literature, English.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3104109
ISBN:	0496516779

Against all odds :The sway of chance in eighteenth-century Britain (Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding).
Molesworth, Jesse Marti.

Against all odds :The sway of chance in eighteenth-century Britain (Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding). [electronic resource] - 285 p.

Advisers: Terry Castle; John Bender.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2003.

In this dissertation I blend literary studies with mathematical history, archival research on eighteenth-century gambling, and contemporary decision theory to examine an exceptionally slippery topic: the struggle to comprehend chance through new modes of probabilistic thinking, and therefore to destroy it. Contrary to current historical research, which has tended to view this assault on chance as an unmitigated success---a quest created, sustained, and eventually conquered by such mathematical prodigies as Blaise Pascal, Abraham De Moivre, and Thomas Bayes---my work highlights the eventual failure of this Enlightenment project. Additionally, contrary to current scholarship (from Ian Watt to John Bender to Michael McKeon to Thomas M. Kavanagh) which has tended to align the emergence of early realist narrative with this cultural sweeping away of chance, I demonstrate the necessity of chance's insolubility in readings of Daniel Defoe's Roxana (1724) and Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751). Chance, as I theorize it, proved to be a most formidable opponent for Enlightenment thinkers, capable of being deferred, mutated, or exchanged for others forms of chance, but never eradicated entirely. Despite the early optimism that an education in probability theory would scourge the country of gambling through an ability to "make a just computation in all games," games of chance not only survived but indeed thrived throughout the century, offering the perverse thrill of beating the odds. And despite creating fictions that operated through a logic of probabilistic causation, both Defoe and Fielding betray not only a reliance but an utter fascination with the mysteries of chance in their final novels. At the end of the century, the Gothic form arose treasuring the very uncertainty and sheer unpredictability that the probabilists had hoped to debunk. Ultimately, I argue that early realist fiction, by valuing and dramatizing the story of a single coin toss energized by the chance's inscrutability, served as a necessary critique of the Enlightenment yearning toward pure abstraction.

ISBN: 0496516779Subjects--Topical Terms:

212435
Literature, English.

Against all odds :The sway of chance in eighteenth-century Britain (Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding).
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