About the Book
How the classical and medieval conceptions of Fortune shifted to the modern notion of chance.Is chance nothing more than a projection of human desire on to the world?In this fascinating new study, John Lyons argues that the idea of chance assumed new vigour in the late Renaissance, when converging philosophical and literary currents demystified the powerful concept of Fortune, sensitizing writers to the relationship between human desire and the world's apparent randomness.Up to now, the story of chance has been written by historians of mathematical thought and has focused on calculation, probability and gambling. Lyons, by contrast, highlights the ethical, aesthetic and even erotic aspects of chance. He offers detailed readings of the works of major French authors - Montaigne, Corneille, Lafayette, Scudery, Pascal, Racine, Bossuet, and La Bruyere.Key Features Renews our understanding of romance, tragedy, comedy & religious polemic in the light of the changed conceptions of the fortuitous Shows how the emergence of suspense and subjective interest are linked to the shift from Fortune to randomness Proposes a new view on how religious writers, faced with the sceptical challenge of late Renaissance thought, integrated chance into the post-Reformation mainstream of Catholic teachingsKeywords: Chance, Fortune, Randomness, Probability, French Early Modern Literature, post-Reformation, Genre, Romance, Prose, Montaigne, Corneille, Moliere, Lafayette, Scudery, Pascal, Racine, Bossuet, La Bruyere
Table of Contents:
Preface: The Phantom of Chance; Starting in the middle of things; The end of fortune and the rise of chance; Acknowledgements; Series Editor's Foreword; Introduction; The tradition of chance; Aristotle and the third type of event; Fortuna and casus; Boethius and the wheel of fortune; Machiavelli and the dissolution of fortune; Montaigne and the sceptical challenge; 1. Fortune, Mistress of Events: Corneille and the Poetics of Tragedy; Chance as cornerstone of poetics; Clitandre, and the poetics of gratuity; Le Cid and the management of chance; Miracles in everyday life; 2. God in a World of Chance: Pascal's Pensées and Lettres provinciales; The Random human condition; From probability to frequency in the Provinciales; The coming of the Messiah was not an effect of chance; When the game is over; 3. From Chance Events to Improbable Actions: Lafayette and the Novel; The shipwreck of romance; Everyday encounters; Silent Chance; 4. The God of Suspense: Bossuet's providential history and Racine's Athalie; God's anamorphic history; Racine's tragedy of errors; 5. An Accidental World: La Bruyère's Caractères; The Heart; Occasion; Love; Machines; Fashion; Index.
About the Author :
John D. Lyons is Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of Virginia. He is the author or editor of 13 books including: Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton University Press, 1989), Kingdom of Disorder. The Theory of Tragedy in Seventeenth-Century France (Purdue University Press, 1999), Before Imagination. Embodied Thought From Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford University Press, 2005) and French Literature. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Review :
Eloquent and compelling, this is a noteworthy contribution to the field.
[A] searching and provocative study.
Overall, this intriguing, erudite, readable study offers some beautiful examples of textual analysis and suggestive avenues for further research. Students and scholars of the period, its authors, and the limits of rationalism will be richly rewarded by Lyons’s insightful reinterpretations, particularly of Zayde and Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History.
John D. Lyons brilliantly shows how, in both literary and religious writing of the Seventeenth Century, the quest for pattern has to come to terms with the apparently irreducible element of randomness in human life. Original in conception, broad in perspective, subtle in analysis, this is a remarkable book.
John Lyons' new take on the issue of chance, supported by illuminating interpretations of major 17th- Century French texts, invites the reader to rethink the enigmatic links between randomness and necessity. Beautifully written, powerfully argued, The Phantom of Chance is a major contribution to the intellectual and literary history of modern times.
John Lyons' new take on the issue of chance, supported by illuminating interpretations of major 17th- century French texts, invites the reader to rethink the enigmatic links between randomness and necessity. Beautifully written, powerfully argued, The Phantom of Chance is a major contribution to the intellectual and literary history of modern times.
