The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxii

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2. Introduction: Relationships and Connections Between Literature and Mathematics

   • Nina Engelhardt, Robert Tubbs

   Pages 1-20Open Access

3. Mathematics in Literature

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 21-21

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   2. Numbered Possibilities: Chaucer and the Evolution of Late-Medieval Mathematics

      • David Baker

      Pages 23-40

   3. Mercantile Arithmetic, Financial Profit, and Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass

      • Joe Jarrett

      Pages 41-60

   4. Mathematics and Poetry in the Nineteenth Century

      • Daniel Brown

      Pages 61-80

   5. Non-Normative Euclideans: Victorian Literature and the Untaught Geometer

      • Alice Jenkins

      Pages 81-96

   6. Mathematical Contrariness in George Eliot’s Novels

      • Derek Ball

      Pages 97-111

   7. Mathematics in Russian Avant-Garde Literature

      • Anke Niederbudde

      Pages 113-127

   8. Uses of Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry in Fiction

      • Alex Kasman

      Pages 129-147

   9. Mathematical Clinamen in the Encyclopedic Novel: Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace

      • Stuart Taylor

      Pages 149-168

   10. Squaring the Circle: A Literary History

       • Robert Tubbs

       Pages 169-185

4. Mathematics and Literary Forms

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 187-187

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   2. Mathematics and Poetic Meter

      • Jason David Hall

      Pages 189-205

   3. Randomizing Form: Stochastics and Combinatorics in Postwar Literature

      • Alison James

      Pages 207-225

   4. Oulipian Mathematics

      • Warren Motte

      Pages 227-241

   5. Mathematics and Dramaturgy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

      • Liliane Campos

      Pages 243-262

   6. Nonlinearity, Writing, and Creative Process

      • Ira Livingston

      Pages 263-278

5. Mathematics, Modernism, and Literature

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 279-279

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   2. Mathematics and Modernism

      • Nina Engelhardt

      Pages 281-298

This handbook features essays written by both literary scholars and mathematicians that examine multiple facets of the connections between literature and mathematics. These connections range from mathematics and poetic meter to mathematics and modernism to mathematics as literature. Some chapters focus on a single author, such as mathematics and Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, or Charles Dickens, while others consider a mathematical topic common to two or more authors, such as squaring the circle, chaos theory, Newton’s calculus, or stochastic processes. With appeal for scholars and students in literature, mathematics, cultural history, and history of mathematics, this important volume aims to introduce the range, fertility, and complexity of the connections between mathematics, literature, and literary theory. 

Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via [link.springer.com|http://link.springer.com/].

• Romantic poetry Euclid
• Mathematics critical theory
• Isaac Newton poetry
• Geometry Victorian literature
• Numbers symbols in medieval literature
• Animal studies mathematics
• Gertrude Stein mathematics
• George Eliot mathematics
• Metaphor as an equation
• Ezra Pound modernism
• Patterns in Victorian mathematics literature
• Stochastics in postwar Literature
• Jorge Louis Borges infinity
• Geoffrey Chaucer chaos theory fractals
• Nonlinear aesthetics
• Mathematical proofs as literature
• Mathematics temporality
• Narrative mathematics
• Meter mathematics
• Mathematics contemporary theater

“This is an astonishing, wonderful book, for it offers a much wider panorama of the connection between literature and mathematics than thought possible … . there is much more in this very stimulating book.” (Victor V. Pambuccian, zbMATH 1475.00017, 2022)

• University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, USA

  Robert Tubbs

• University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

  Alice Jenkins

• Department for English Literatures, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

  Nina Engelhardt

Robert Tubbs is Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. He has published numerous research papers and four books, including What is a Number? (2009) and Mathematics in Twentieth Century Literature and Art (2014), both on mathematics and the humanities. 

Alice Jenkins is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her research centers on the emergence of the knowledge economy in the nineteenth century. Publications include Space and the 'March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences, 1815-1850 (2007). She is co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine series.

Nina Engelhardt is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. She is author of the monograph Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics (2018) and co-editor of Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction (Palgrave 2019).

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