Provides a comprehensive overview of the intersection between literature and mathematics and features wide-ranging scholarship on a variety of areas from medieval literature to contemporary literature.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Relationships and Connections Between Literature and Mathematics - Nina Engelhardt and Robert Tubbs
• Part I: Mathematics in Literature
• Numbered Possibilities: Chaucer and the Evolution of Late-Medieval Mathematics - David Baker
• Mercantile Arithmetic, Financial Profit, and Ben Jonson's The Devil Is an Ass - Joe Jarrett
• Mathematics and Poetry in the Nineteenth Century - Daniel Brown
• Non-Normative Euclideans: Victorian Literature and the Untaught Geometer - Alice Jenkins
• Mathematical Contrariness in George Eliot's Novels - Derek Ball
• Mathematics in Russian Avant-Garde Literature - Anke Niederbudde
• Uses of Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry in Fiction - Alex Kasman
• Mathematical Clinamen in the Encyclopedic Novel: Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace - Stuart Taylor
• Squaring the Circle: A Literary History - Robert Tubbs
• Part II: Mathematics and Literary Forms
• Mathematics and Poetic Meter - Jason David Hall
• Randomizing Form: Stochastics and Combinatorics in Postwar Literature - Alison James
• Oulipian Mathematics - Warren Motte
• Mathematics and Dramaturgy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries - Liliane Campos
• Nonlinearity, Writing, and Creative Process - Ira Livingston
• Part III: Mathematics, Modernism, and Literature
• Mathematics and Modernism - Nina Engelhardt
• Mathematics in German Literature: Paradoxes of Infinity - Howard Pollack-Milgate
• The Ghosts of Departed Quantities: Samuel Beckett and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Chris Ackerley
• “Numbers Have Such Pretty Names”: Gertrude Stein's Mathematical Poetics - Anne Brubaker
• Modernist Literature and Modernist Mathematics I: Mathematics and Composition, with Mallarmé, Heisenberg, and Derrida - Arkady Plotnitsky
• Modernist Literature and Modernist Mathematics II: Mathematics and Event, with Mallarmé, Gödel, and Badiou - Arkady Plotnitsky
• Part IV: Relations Between Literature and Mathematics
• King Lear, Without the Mathematics: From Reading Mathematics to Reading Mathematically - Travis D. Williams
• Newton, Burns, and a Poetics of Figure: Toward a Prehistory of Consilience - Matthew Wickman
• The Mathematics of Associationism in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy - Aaron Ottinger
• Romantic Parts and Wholes, Statistical and Literary - Margaret Kolb
• “Colours of the Dying Dolphin”: Nineteenth-Century Defenses of Literature and Mathematics - Imogen Forbes-Macphail
• Combinatorial Characters - Andrea Henderson
• Datelines - Steven Connor
• The Metaphor as an Equation: Ezra Pound and the Similitudes of Representation - Jocelyn Rodal
• Part V: Mathematics as Literature
• Rehearsing in the Margins: Mathematical Print and Mathematical Learning in the Early Modern Period - Benjamin Wardhaugh
• Mathematics, Narrative, and Temporality - Marcus Tomalin
• A Cognitive and Quantitative Approach to Mathematical Concretization - Marc Alexander