...David A. P. Womble Abstract This essay argues that the Victorian novel recast the cognitive deficiencies associated with the mass as necessary traits for inhabiting a statistically rendered public sphere. In order to attribute personhood to an influx of potentially asocial bodies that fell short...

...Michael Klotz This essay argues that the depiction of characters in Victorian realist fiction was shaped by an emerging cultural interest in the aggregation and analysis of statistical information about historical individuals and the subsequent production of the hypothetical persons of statistical...

... the novel's centuries-long preoccupation with city life. Recent novels lend texture and detail to sublime statistics generated by the United Nations and other organizations of enormous and seemingly unmanageable urban growth. When they expand the novel's hoary catalog of urban forms, contemporary writings...

.... After examining the census's influence on episodes such as “Ithaca” and “Wandering Rocks,” the author argues that Joyce embraces a key assumption of the statistical movement that gave rise to the census: the idea that individuals are quantifiable, and thus commensurate, almost to the point of being...

... to investigate Hardy's use of chance and probability in the construction of Wessex's symbolic ecology. I will argue that the figure of the animal helps articulate two parallel developments: the gradual erosion of determinism as society becomes statistical under biopower (what Ian Hacking calls the “taming...

...-but is a relatively recent product, emerging in thd mid-nineteenth-century through the emergence of eugenics, statis- tics, and medical science. Adolphe Quetelet's invention of statistics or Francis Galton's eugenics research helped create a statistical average individual (l'homme moyen...

... for justifying an evolutionary approach to the analysis of art—as though artworks are natural phenomena subject to measurement and classification. However, Koren's novella suggests that the break between the abstract worldly form and Israel's statist society should be understood as more than a neat way...

... as dependent on literacy and print as is the novel itself (3). Moretti's preface begins with a riff on Barthes: "Countless are the novels of the world." But these volumes suggest that novels can be counted. As the novel is empiricist, so are the "statistical profiles" that chart novel production...

... submits that narrative grinds to a halt when it switches from narrating what will happen to probability theory’s territory—what might happen. Molesworth shows how in A Journal of the Plague Year, H. F.’s apparent shift toward modern statistical thinking—mimicking the evolution from descriptive...

... and Themes (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), pp. 960, cloth, $125.00, paper, $35.00. To those sympathetic to Moretti's general project--one of combining literary criticism and history with statistical analysis, employing models creatively hijacked from other disciplines (see also his playful...

... embody. The novel, as the shadow or the wraith of the epic, echoes a vitalist past. To conclude, Franco Moretti takes the novel back to Lukácsian bad infinity and thereby generates statistical panic. By promoting a crypto-Darwinian rise and fall of genres, Moretti mitigates...

... in excess of the total. In its quantita- tive register, this concept belongs to the statistical imagination that supports what Nikolas Rose characterizes as liberalism’s project of “governing by numbers” (qtd. 230 novel | summer 2010 in Joyce 24).3 Where it appears in Bleak House, however...

... Sun, which supplements think tank statistics measuring state instability with a narrative of civil war written from the standpoint of its survivors. Half of a Yellow Sun offers a detailed account of everyday life before and during the late 1960s Biafran civil war. In so doing, the novel argues...

... a deliberate decision by the authorities, while in our society it is an effect without originary legislation or identity, with no "they" visibly malung the decisions, an outcome that can merely be predicted with high statistical reliability? As the frame for this high-tech revival of quasi-feudal...

...,” Franta considers the possibility that Humphry Clinker performs a kind of statistical analysis of society as a “web of connections or a texture of relationships” (66–67). Humphry Clinker ostensibly takes the narrative form of a map across which the Bramble party travels, portraying diverse spatial...

..., Margolis is less decisive—and, it seems, deliberately so. To understand public opinion prior to the rise of statistical polling, she chooses to study a group of writers preoccupied with the transmission of information and opinion through speech. As such, a set of fictions by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar...

... a sense of what it feels like to be a statistic” (26). The notion of the average is a deeply novelistic one, Jaffe points out, insofar as the novel seeks both to “[shrink] a multiplicity of individuals into a single entity, or what novel theory usually calls a ‘type’” (31), and also to reproduce...

... was invested in statistical linguistic analysis as well as in the affects of aesthetic experience). More important, Morgan suggests Lee's objective aesthetic theory may inspire ways of marrying phenomenological accounts of aesthetic experience (the feeling of reading, the affects of art) with quantifiable...

... familiar narrative emblen of ideological individualism. All that having been said, however, I have to admit that at first I didn't find much of a puzzle here. The supposedly hidden principle of sociability seems to me to belong right alongside what General Social Survey statistics...

... defended his doctoral thesis, The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis, at the University of Texas in 1969. In the thesis, he explored, but finally questioned, the value of statistical methods of stylistic description for literary analysis. It is true that Coetzee refers...