Robert Tubbs

Alice Jenkins

Nina Engelhardt

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.

The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics

In 1818 Michael Faraday and a handful of London artisans formed a self-help group with the aim of teaching themselves how to write like gentleman. For a year and a half, this essay circle met regularly to read and critique one another’s writings and the “Mental Exercises” they produced are a record of life, literary tastes, and the social and political ideas of dissenting artisans in Regency London. This volume is the first to publish the essays and poems produced by Faraday’s circle and it includes not only the complete corpus of the group’s writings, but detailed annotations, extracts from key sources, a full-length biographical, historical, and a literary introduction as well. Valuable not only for Romantic and early-Victorian historians, but for literary scholars and the general reader as well, this collection sheds considerable light on the developing mind of one our greatest scientists. “Mental Exercises is an important document for historians interested in the lives and education of artisans of the period.”—Geoffrey Cantor, University of Leeds

An Artisan Essay-circle in Regency London

Michael Faraday's Mental Exercises

Discussing the idea of space in the first half of the 19th century, this book uses contemporary poetry, essays, and fiction as well as scientific papers, textbooks, and journalism to give an account of 19th-century literature's relationship with science.

Alice Jenkins

About

Books

Join the club