Enlightenment And The Shadows Of Chance

Author : Thomas M. Kavanagh
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 1993
Category : History
ISBN : UOM:39076001436307

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Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance by Thomas M. Kavanagh Pdf

While Montesquieu was praising indifference to financial gain, Louis XV regularly presided over dizzying gambling games at Versailles. While Descartes was advancing a strategy for escaping from chance by appealing to the protocols of certainty, clandestine gambling operations in Paris numbered in the hundreds. Despite efforts by the major figures of the French Enlightenment to suppress the period's fascination with chance, high-stakes gambling was an integral part of the social rituals of the most influential groups within the ancien regime. In Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance, Thomas Kavanagh explores this important paradox to shed light on the genesis, development, and function of the eighteenth-century French novel. First considering the roles of chance and gambling in the epistemological, social, and economic histories of the period, Kavanagh shows that doctrines of chance played a denied yet operative role in important aspects of what the French Enlightenment proclaimed itself to be. He then looks at representations of chance in the novels of Prechac, Prevost, Voltaire, Denon, Crebillon, and Diderot, and shows how they tell two stories: that of a deterministic and ordered universe, and that of a world of fortuitous events determined only by chance. It was the tension and interplay between these two poles, Kavanagh argues, that contributed in an important way to the development of the Enlightenment's ideal of the rational man.

Author : Geoffrey Wilson Clark
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Civilization
ISBN : 0719056756

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Betting on Lives by Geoffrey Wilson Clark Pdf

By examining the rise of life insurance institutions in 18th-century England, this book offers fresh insight into the history of a commercial society learning to apply speculative techniques to the management of risk.

Author : Jared Poley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2023-09-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9781009393522

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Luck, Leisure, and the Casino in Nineteenth-Century Europe by Jared Poley Pdf

Casino gambling is central to understanding the cultural, social, and intellectual history of nineteenth-century Europe. Tracing the development of casino gambling across this period, this book connects that story to ideas about chance, luck, emotions, and psychology, and reveals how Europeans used gambling to understand their changing world.

Author : Jesse Molesworth
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2010-07-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521191081

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Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel by Jesse Molesworth Pdf

A study of the relationship between realism, probability and chance in eighteenth-century fiction.

Author : Jonathan Sheehan,Dror Wahrman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2022-12-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226824048

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Invisible Hands by Jonathan Sheehan,Dror Wahrman Pdf

A synthesis of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural developments that offers an original explanation of how Enlightenment thought grappled with the problem of divine agency. Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems—natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others—whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world’s disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effect—but with them also a new ability to imagine the world’s orders, whether natural or manmade, as self-organizing. If large systems are left to their own devices, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly came to believe, order will emerge on its own without any need for external design or direction. In Invisible Hands, Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman trace the many appearances of the language of self-organization in the eighteenth-century West. Across an array of domains, including religion, society, philosophy, science, politics, economy, and law, they show how and why this way of thinking came into the public view, then grew in prominence and arrived at the threshold of the nineteenth century in versatile, multifarious, and often surprising forms. Offering a new synthesis of intellectual and cultural developments, Invisible Hands is a landmark contribution to the history of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century culture.

Author : David H. Walker
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781846314872

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Consumer Chronicles by David H. Walker Pdf

At a time when the world is facing the depletion of nonrenewable natural resources, consumer society is increasingly being called into question. Nowhere is this more evident than in France, where the consumer revolution has long been perceived as a challenge to artisanal crafts, local business, and other key elements of French culture. David H. Walker here charts the portrayal of consumer behavior in the works of Gide, Zola, Jean Valmy-Basse, and Elsa Triolet and analyzes these testimonies in relation to their social, cultural and historical milieu. Consumer Chronicles offers an imaginative look at the impact of affluence on French consumers, shopkeepers, and society and provides valuable insight into the history of the consumer mentality in the twentieth century.

Author : John C. O'Neal
Publisher : University of Delaware
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2011-03-14
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781611490251

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The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment by John C. O'Neal Pdf

In The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment, John C. O'Neal draws largely on the etymological meaning of the word confusion as the action of mixing or blending in order to trace the development of this project which, he claims, aimed to reject dogmatic thinking in all of its forms and recognized the need to embrace complexity. Eighteenth-century thinkers used the notion of confusion in a progressive way to reorganize social classes, literary forms, metaphysical substances, scientific methods, and cultural categories such as taste and gender. In this new work, O'Neal explores some of the paradoxes of the Enlightenment's theories of knowledge. Each of the chapters in this book attempts to address the questions raised by the eighteenth century's particular approach to confusion as a paradoxical reorganizing principle for the period's progressive agenda. Perhaps the most paradoxical thinker of his times, Diderot occupies a central place in this study of confusion. Other authors include Marivaux, CrZbillon, Voltaire, and Pinel, among others. Rousseau and Sade serve as counterexamples to this kind of enlightenment but ultimately do not so much oppose the period's poetics of confusion as they complement it. The final chapter on Sade combines contemporary discussions of politics, society, culture, philosophy, and science in an encyclopedic way that at once reflects the entire period's tendencies and establishes important differences between Sade's thinking and that of the mainstream philosophes. Ultimately, confusion serves, O'Neal argues, as an overarching positive notion for the Enlightenment and its progressive ideals.

Author : Allen Thiher
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780826263469

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Fiction Rivals Science by Allen Thiher Pdf

Author : James Carney,Michael O’Sullivan,Karl White
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2011-11-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781443835381

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Beckett Re-Membered by James Carney,Michael O’Sullivan,Karl White Pdf

Beckett Re-Membered showcases some of the most recent scholarship on the Irish novelist, poet, and playwright, Samuel Beckett. As well as essays on Beckett’s literary output, it contains a section on the philosophical dimension of his work – an important addition, given the profound impact Beckett has had on European philosophy. Rather than attempting to circumscribe Beckett scholarship by advocating a theoretical position or thematic focus, Beckett Re-Membered reflects the exciting and diverse range of critical interventions that Beckett studies continues to generate. In the nineteen essays that comprise this volume, every major articulation of Beckett’s work is addressed, with the result that it offers an unusually comprehensive survey of its target author. Beckett Re-Membered will appeal to any reader who is interested in provocative responses to one of the twentieth century’s most important European writers.

Author : Julia Hoydis
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 674 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2019-09-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783110615418

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Risk and the English Novel by Julia Hoydis Pdf

Taking the cue from the currency of risk in popular and interdisciplinary academic discourse, this book explores the development of the English novel in relation to the emergence and institutionalization of risk, from its origins in probability theory in the late seventeenth century to the global ‘risk society’ in the twenty-first century. Focussing on 29 novels from Defoe to McEwan, this book argues for the contemporaneity of the rise of risk and the novel and suggests that there is much to gain from reading the risk society from a diachronic, literary-cultural perspective. Tracing changes and continuities, the fictional case studies reveal the human preoccupation with safety and control of the future. They show the struggle with uncertainties and the construction of individual or collective ‘logics’ of risk, which oscillate between rational calculation and emotion, helplessness and denial, and an enabling or destructive sense of adventure and danger. Advancing the study of risk in fiction beyond the confinement to dystopian disaster narratives, this book shows how topical notions, such as chance and probability, uncertainty and responsibility, fears of decline and transgression, all cluster around risk.

Author : Anne Duprat,Fiona McIntosh Varjabédian,Anne-Gaëlle Weber
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 450 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2024-03-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781003828808

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Figures of Chance I by Anne Duprat,Fiona McIntosh Varjabédian,Anne-Gaëlle Weber Pdf

Figures of Chance I: Chance in Literature and the Arts (16th–21st Centuries) proposes a transhistorical analysis that will serve as a reference work on the evolution of literary and artistic representations of chance and contingency. Alongside its multidisciplinary companion volume (Figures of Chance II), it considers how the projective and predictive capacity of societies is shaped by representations and cultural models of a reality that is understood, to varying degrees, to be contingent, unpredictable, or chaotic. Giving special emphasis to the French context while also developing broad cross-cultural comparisons, this volume examines the dialogue between evolving conceptions and changing representations of chance, from Renaissance figures of Fortune to the data-driven world of the present. Written by recognized specialists of each of the periods studied, it identifies and historicizes the main fictional and factual modes of portraying, narrating, and comprehending chance in the West.

Author : Manfred Zollinger
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2016-03-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9781317071563

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Random Riches by Manfred Zollinger Pdf

Gambling is a fascinating subject which for many centuries has attracted public interest. Yet, despite its ubiquity, gambling (or gaming) leads a marginal existence within the boundaries of scholarly research. Providing a longue duree survey, this volume promotes a historical understanding of the subject enriched with a diverse academic approach that draws upon sociology, economics and psychology. Each chapter in the collection is the work of a renowned scholar with a long standing interest in gambling research. The contributions offer historical analyses of the medieval origins of the 'Gambler State' and of mathematical risk calculation. They cast light on the roles of different stakeholders in gambling including the playing public, business, and the state. They provide a controversial discussion of the alleged 'pathological' nature of chance games and the reasons for either regulating or freeing them from state control. Last but not least, two authors deal with country-by-country specifics in gaming cultures and gambling markets. Taken as a whole, the chapters in this volume chart the development of European gambling culture from the medieval to modern times. In so doing it provides essential context for both historical and current debates about the nature of gambling and lotteries, addiction to gambling, poverty and social degradation on the fringes of the welfare state.

Author : John D Lyons
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2011-11-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780748653799

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Phantom of Chance by John D Lyons Pdf

Provides a new account of the crucial shift from the classical and medieval conception of Fortune to the modern notion of chance or randomness.

Author : Amy Chazkel
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2011-06-28
Category : Games & Activities
ISBN : 9780822349884

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Laws of Chance by Amy Chazkel Pdf

Chronicles the first decades of an informal lottery called the jogo do bicho, or animal game, which originated in Rio de Janeiro in 1892, and remains popular in Brazil today.

Author : Eric Wertheimer
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0804750890

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Underwriting by Eric Wertheimer Pdf

This book is about the historical influence insurance has had on American culture.