The Victorian novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and others have been characterized as having lapsed plotlines, endless digressions, and an obsessive devotion to background characters. But, as Henry James asked, what do these elements mean artistically?
The Physics of Possibility answers this question by charting a thirty-year span when the mathematics of chance transformed the physical sciences of the mid-nineteenth century. Michael Tondre shows that what might be considered literary ""weaknesses"" actually reflect a reorientation of the basic formal categories of object, action, and setting in investigations of chance within Victorian physical science and mathematics. Novelists cultivated a common vernacular with this new science, inventing shared doctrines of realism.
Using an interdisciplinary method grounded in close readings of specific texts and archival materials, and drawing on science studies, philosophy, object theories, and cultural history, The Physics of Possibility interprets innovations across different forms of writing, tracing a trajectory from a handful of mathematically -minded savants in 1850 to a shared understanding of fiction as a vehicle devoted to the production of possible worlds.
About the Author :
Michael Tondre is Assistant Professor of English at Stony Brook University.
Review :
The Physics of Possibility offers an excellent and substantial contribution to the field of studies on Victorian literature and science. As Tondre rightly observes, the distinctiveness of this period is apt to be overlooked in considerations of literature and physics, which assume the Victorians are still steeped in an eighteenth-century Newtonian worldview or view Victorian physics merely as precursors to the early-twentieth century revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics. The book is interesting, original, and quite polished.
--Barri J. Gold, Muhlenberg College, author of ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science
"Beautifully researched, beguiling, and risky in all the best ways, The Physics of Possibility opens entirely new possibilities for how we read chance in the nineteenth-century novel. Tondre convincingly teases out the complex texture of Victorian debates over probability, perspective, and normalization within contemporary mathematics, astronomy, evolutionary science, and thermodynamics. Along the way, he upends our casual sense that the realist novel simulates chance on the way to confident determinations of plot. Tondre argues, on the contrary, that novelistic probability opened a range of new prospects for indeterminacy, alternative futures, and the 'unpredictable swerve of material forms.' Offering new approaches to science and literature, queer studies, narrative theory and the physics of character, it is impossible not to be moved by The Physics of Possibility."
--Devin Griffiths, University of Southern California, author of The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins
As an account of how probability recontoured both science and literature, The Physics of Possibility truly shines.... Its argumentative polyvocality makes for a dynamic readingexperience and perhaps contributes to Tondre's tendency to surprise the reader with rich local insights far beyond what even the strong overall argument would lead you to expect.
--Modern Philology
Tondre (English, Stony Brook Univ.) argues for the ways that developments in mathematics and physics were intricately connected not only to work of Darwin and others' thinking through variation and natural selection, but also to formal experiments, particularly in relation to time, in Victorian literature.... [T]he book's fresh insights into Dickens, Eliot, and other oft-studied authors make it appropriate for most college and university libraries where English is studied. The index and copious bibliography would also make valuable tools for students studying Victorian literature and/or the history of science. Summing Up: Recommended.
--CHOICE
Tondre offers a robust commentary on his selected novels while also documenting the convergence of physical sciences and historiographical thinking in the mid-nineteenth century. He evidences how fictional works 'contributed to theories incipient in science' and redirected the 'physics of variation toward [more] progressive social agendas' in Victorian Britain. Tondre constructs a comprehensive framework of historical, scientific, and literary artefacts to help readers recognize the boundlessness of possibility and the inherent value in striving toward it.
--British Society for Literature and Science
