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Palgrave Macmillan

The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics

  • Book
  • © 2021

Overview

  • Provides a comprehensive overview of the intersection between literature and mathematics

  • Features wide-ranging scholarship on a variety of areas from medieval literature to contemporary literature

  • Brings together top researchers and their interdisciplinary and cutting-edge work

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Table of contents (33 chapters)

  1. Mathematics and Literary Forms

  2. Mathematics, Modernism, and Literature

Keywords

About this book

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/].

Reviews

“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)

Editors and Affiliations

  • 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

About the editors

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).

Bibliographic Information

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