عنوان

Probable Histories:

Number

TL3j37s643

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

Probable Histories:

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Kolb, Margaret

Title Proper by Another Author

Novel Recoveries of the Past

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Duncan, Ian

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

UC Berkeley

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2016

Body granting the degree

UC Berkeley

Text preceding or following the note

2016

Text of Note

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the simultaneous rise of two discourses that promised to explain the past and predict the future: probability and the novel. The two were not merely historically coincident. In dialogue from the start, "Probable Histories" argues that probability and the novel were also mutually constitutive. Drawing on standard histories of each, I summarize their respective "rises" in the eighteenth century and analyze their interdependence. I then turn to a series of case studies, investigating the novels of Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Walter Scott, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy as points of intersection between the concerns of probability and those of the novel. The project reveals how these two modes of temporal projection extend and inform one another as modes of prediction. In so doing, "Probable Histories" offers a new account of the novel's shared role in conceptualizing causation.

Kolb, Margaret

Duncan, Ian

UC Berkeley

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y