Description
Explores how modernist prose fiction was influenced by the 19th-century mathematical revolution of the concept of infinity.
About the Author
Baylee Brits is a research fellow at the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia and teaches English Literature and Media Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the co-editor of Aesthetics After Finitude (2016) and The Covert Plant (2017), both anthologies on contemporary intersections between science, literature and art.
Reviews
Baylee Brits legitimates a whole new subfield of modernism studies, the study of the links between science and literature. Her focus on modernist allegories of literature reflected in numbers, allied with her deep understanding of what the mathematization of textual infinity can yield, produces remarkably original readings, thus brilliantly launching a new hermeneutics of modernism. * Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA, author of The Pathos of Distance (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Rust (Bloomsbury, 2018) *
The ancient struggle between science and literature has always taken place in the gulf between finitude and the infinite. In this extraordinary book, Baylee Brits shows us how a range of great 20th-century writers took up the mathematical challenges issued by Georg Cantor, creating literary works by experimenting with numbers. Their 'transfinite allegories' incarnate new relations of literature and science. * Justin Clemens, Associate Professor of English and Theatre Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia *
Baylee Brits's excellent book offers a deeply intelligent yet accessible account of the relationship between modernist literary form and Cantor's revolutionary mathematical modernism. Brimming with interdisciplinary energy and underpinned with careful scholarship, this book makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how and why literary modernists used formal numerical experimentation and the paradoxes of number in their reconfigurations of the relationship between words and meaning. * Laura Salisbury, Associate Professor in Medicine & English Literature, University of Exeter, UK *
Book Information
ISBN 9781501352591
Author Prof Baylee Brits
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic USA
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Weight(grams) 304g