Calculated Words: The Hidden Math of Eighteenth-Century Literature

Abstract

By tracing the historical forces of geometry and Newtonian physics and calculus, a vein of otherwise latent critical analysis opens for approaches to the English literature of the eighteenth century. In Calculated Words, mathematical principles serve both as a method of studying literature and as an object of study within literature. By first tracing the mathematical tendencies present throughout the history of literary criticism, I establish a precedent for the work that comprises each chapter, work that ranges from tracing the influence of Newtonian calculus’s interest in minutiae on early novelistic technique in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753) to examining how the limits of geometrical knowledge make social and literary formulations more difficult to figure in the work of Adam Smith and Henry Fielding. Finally, despite the benefits that incorporating scientific and mathematic advancements into our thinking offers, I conclude by emphasizing the continuing importance of local, interpersonal relationships and understandings of the world.