This book reveals how changing concepts of chance shaped the way American writers struggled with doubt and belief. The nineteenth century witnessed a probabilistic revolution—in emerging sciences of chance (from mathematics to statistical sociology to Darwinism), new cultural practices (involving gambling, warfare, weather forecasting, and financial speculation), and religious faith (including theological and popular understandings of providence). Though traditionally dismissed as a nominal concept indicating human ignorance of causes, chance became increasingly acknowledged as a natural force ... More

This book reveals how changing concepts of chance shaped the way American writers struggled with doubt and belief. The nineteenth century witnessed a probabilistic revolution—in emerging sciences of chance (from mathematics to statistical sociology to Darwinism), new cultural practices (involving gambling, warfare, weather forecasting, and financial speculation), and religious faith (including theological and popular understandings of providence). Though traditionally dismissed as a nominal concept indicating human ignorance of causes, chance became increasingly acknowledged as a natural force to be managed but never mastered. Nineteenth-century literary figures made distinctive contributions to the probabilistic revolution by imaginatively pursuing moral, political, psychological, and aesthetic lines of inquiry not usually associated with the subject. The unsettling, wonderful possibilities of chance play out across literature of the time—in Poe’s meta-critical detective fiction, in Melville’s struggles with moral action, in Douglass’s fight against scientific racism, in Thoreau’s empirical skepticism, and in Dickinson’s efforts to render poetically a faith and aesthetics of surprise. Uncertain Chances shows how American writers in and around the Civil War anticipate subsequent attitudes toward chance in pragmatist thought and beyond. Their work may even help to navigate extremes that remain with us today—fundamentalism and relativism, determinism and chaos, hubristic risk management and terrorism, the rational confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of modernity.