Uncertain Chances

The role of chance changed in the nineteenth century, and American literature changed with it. Long dismissed as a nominal concept, chance was increasingly treated as a natural force to be managed but never mastered. New theories of chance sparked religious and philosophical controversies while revolutionizing the sciences as probabilistic methods spread from mathematics, economics, and sociology to physics and evolutionary biology. Chance also became more visiblein everyday life, as Americans attempted to control its power through weather forecasting, insurance policies, military strategy, and financial dealings.Uncertain Chances shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers confronted questions of doubt and belief. Poe's detective fiction critiques probabilistic methods; Melville's works struggle to vindicate moral action under conditions of chance; Douglass and other African American authors fight against statistical racism; Thoreau learns to appreciate the play between nature's randomness and order; and Dickinson works faithfully to render poetically theaffective experience of chance-surprise. These and other nineteenth-century writers dramatize the inescapable dangers and wonderful possibilities of chance. Their writings even help to navigate extremes that remain with us today—fundamentalism and relativism, determinism and chaos, terrorism andrisk-management, the rational confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of modernity.

An erudite...densely informative study., Uncertain Chances is an adventurous, learned, and powerfully argued inquiry into the manifold ways in which the ideas of chance, indeterminacy, and probability energized the thinking of the most prominent authors of the antebellum era. Over and again well-known texts and authors appear in a surprising new light., Impressively wide-ranging and erudite, Uncertain Chances presents an original account of how antebellum American writers used chance to come to terms with doubt. Unlike the usual historical narrative, Lee's study persuasively argues that nineteenth-century America's exploration of the problem of doubt and the solution of probability was well underway before the Civil War and the pragmatism of Pierce, James, and Dewey., In this trenchant, wide-ranging, and witty book, Maurice Lee analyzes the intellectual affinity between Poe, Melville, Thoreau, Douglass, and Dickinson—who grappled with uncertainty—and the later philosophical pragmatism of writers such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Showing continuity, not simply disruption, across the Civil War, Lee rewrites nineteenth-century American literary and intellectual history., Lee's theoretical sophistication and clear, direct prose proves a winning combination that will likely satisfy all readers...Essential.

Maurice S. Lee is Associate Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830-1860 and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass.