Risk and the English Novel : : From Defoe to McEwan / / Julia Hoydis.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2019 Part 1
• VerfasserIn: Hoydis, Julia,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series , 66
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (VIII, 666 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Risk Theory and Narrative Fiction – An Interdisciplinary Overview -- Part I. Survival Against the Odds: The Rise of Risk in the 18th‐century Novel -- 1. Calculating a New View of Life -- 2. Defoe and his Protagonists at Large in the Risk Society -- 3. Swift, Smollett, Sterne, and Walpole: Fears of Masculinity and Parodies of Calculation -- 4. Picturing Female Youth at Risk: Camilla -- Part II. Out of the Ordinary: The Gamble of Life in the 19th‐century Novel -- 5. Old and New Concerns -- 6. Precariousness, Accidents, and Divisions -- 7. Epic Tales of Ambition and Speculation -- 8. The Dangers of Human Nature and the Struggle Between the Sexes -- Part III. Crisis and Contingency: Threats to Humanity in the 20th- and 21st-century Novel -- 9. A Sense of Endings -- 10. Gendered Routines of Risk-Taking -- 11. Running Out of Time -- 12. Domestic (In)securities -- Epilogue -- Works Cited -- Subject Index -- Index of Persons