Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (Haney Foundation Series)

302 Pages·2016·3.623 MB·English

by  Matthew Wickman

Literature After Euclid
HANEYFOUNDATIONSERIES
AvolumeintheHaneyFoundationSeries,
establishedin1961withthegeneroussupport
ofDr.JohnLouisHaney
Literature After Euclid
The Geometric Imagination
in the Long Scottish Enlightenment
Matthew Wickman
university of pennsylvania press
philadelphia
Copyright(cid:2)2016UniversityofPennsylvaniaPress
Allrightsreserved.Exceptforbriefquotationsusedfor
purposesofrevieworscholarlycitation,noneofthisbook
maybereproducedinanyformbyanymeanswithout
writtenpermissionfromthepublisher.
Publishedby
UniversityofPennsylvaniaPress
Philadelphia,Pennsylvania19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmericaonacid-freepaper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Wickman,Matthew,author.
LiteratureafterEuclid:thegeometricimaginationinthe
longScottishEnlightenment/MatthewWickman.
pagescm.—(HaneyFoundationseries)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN978-0-8122-4795-4(alk.paper)
1.Scottishliterature—18thcentury—Historyandcriticism.
2.Englishliterature—Scottishauthors—Historyand
criticism.3.Geometryinliterature.4.Enlightenment—
Scotland.5.Scotland—Intellectuallife—18thcentury.I.Title.
II.Series:HaneyFoundationseries.
PR8547.W532016
820.9’9411—dc23
2015022963
ForKerry,Hadley,andElena:adventurersonallmytangents
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contents
Introduction 1
PART I. THEOREM: SHAPES OF TIME
Chapter1.Scotland’sAgeofUnion:TowardanElongated
EighteenthCentury 21
Chapter2.Scott’sShapes 53
PART II. SCHOLIUM: SCENES OF WRITING
Chapter3.‘‘WildGeometry’’andthePicturesque 95
Chapter4.BurnsAfterReading,or,OnthePoeticFold
BetweenShapeandNumber 130
PART III. LOCUS: MEASURING
THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT
ACROSS HISTORY
Chapter5.TheNewtonianTurn/Turning
fromNewton:JamesThomson’sPoeticCalculus 163
Chapter6.ALongandShapelyEighteenthCentury 194
viii Contents
Notes 223
Bibliography 255
Index 275
Acknowledgments 291
Introduction
Alwaysvisualize!Increasingly,thisrevisionofFredricJameson’sfamousopen-
ingsalvoinhis1981studyThePoliticalUnconscious—‘‘Alwayshistoricize!’’—
seemstobeacquiringthestatusofanimperativeinanageofbigdata,when
traditional distinctions of canon and period seem ever less satisfying, ever
more the product of historiographical accident.1 Visualization, the graphical
displayofinformation,accompaniesanewmethodofhistoricistengagement:
distantreading.AsFrancoMorettiputsitinhiscollectionbearingthattitle,
‘‘The trouble with close reading,’’ the method of much of the ‘‘new’’—that
is, old—historicism, ‘‘is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small
canon. . . . [Y]ou invest so much in individual texts only if you think that
very few of them really matter. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense.’’2 And in
anerawhendigitalarchivesmakevastcorpusesavailableonline,adiminish-
ing number of scholars, it seems, find close reading sensible. ‘‘Close reading
isnotonlyimpracticalasameansofgatheringevidenceinthedigitallibrary,’’
Matthew Jockers argues, ‘‘but big data render it totally inappropriate as a
methodofstudyingliteraryhistory.’’3Inpart,thisisbecausetheexponential
increase in the amount of information at our disposal and the capacity to
scalethatinformationtosizesrangingfromthevirtuallyinfinitetotheinfin-
itesimalwillinexorablyexertaninfluenceonthekindsofhistoricalquestions
we are able to pose. These are stories we must show as much as tell. And
so, digital humanists make the case that scholars of literary history ‘‘have
increasingly become involved in what is often referred to as the ‘visual turn’
...sometimescorrelatedwiththe‘spatialturn’thathasfavoredmapping.’’4
If we ask the question, as digital humanists often do, of how our tools
forengagingthepastreflectthetoolsofthatpast,thenwemayfindourselves
considering‘‘modelsofstatisticalexpression,suchasbarandpiecharts,[that]
came from the world of 18th century ‘political arithmetic’ and provided a
richandmuchdevelopedlegacythatextendedthevocabularyofmucholder
visual forms of diagrams, grids, and trees.’’5 Or, we may undertake a more