Democracy, Terror, and Utopia in Dickens's<i>A Tale of Two Cities</i>

Lamouria, Lanya

doi:10.1017/s1060150320000467

Cited by 8 publications

References 22 publications

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The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Markovits

2025

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The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature considers how the avalanche of printed numbers characterizing the period affected its literature. While it touches on the rise of statistics and developments in politics and mathematics, this book takes as its starting point the presence of actual numbers—ordinal and cardinal, Arabic, Roman, or spelled out in words—within the century’s literary texts. It is through the deployment of such figures that texts display their number sense; similarly, readers develop the faculty of number sense by paying attention to their presence. And while it often takes us back to a specific historical context, attention to a text’s use of numbers also enables more fundamental recognitions about how literature makes meaning. The book asks what kinds of work, intellectual and ethical, literature’s numerical figures perform. Why are some writers especially numbery? What affordances do numbers wield in various literary environments and against a specific historical backdrop? How do they relate to aspects like plot and character, narrative and lyric? How do they interact with seriality, so central to nineteenth-century publication? When do the numbers really count, and when do they ask us to keep count? Lingering over texts’ measures illuminates the way numbers help shape literary works into the recognizable forms we call genres; one marks both lyric and the Bildungsroman but looks very different in each setting. Number sense uncovers how numbers can serve both as valves, releasing cultural pressures, and as fulcrums, places where pressures coincide to create new forms of literary agency.

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The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Markovits

2025

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Dedication

Markovits

2025

The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature

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Introduction

Markovits

2025

The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature

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This chapter lays out the historical conditions that produced the numberiness of nineteenth-century writing, such as the institution of the census and the rise of statistics and of democratic liberal individualism. It also begins to uncover more fundamental and ancient links between numbers and literature. The chapter then demonstrates the methods of the book and their potential payoff by way of a trio of brief readings of a specific, highly charged figure: three. Leaning into this number’s presence in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, D. G. Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge,” and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre yields insights into how these very different works of literature make their meanings. The number three juggles between older and newer forms of signification—between mystical and factual realms—and, in the process, heralds the tensions between past and present.

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Democracy, Terror, and Utopia in Dickens'sA Tale of Two Cities

Cited by 8 publications

References 22 publications

The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature

The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature

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