The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Stefanie Markovits

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.

Stefanie Markovits is a professor of English at Yale University. She researches and teaches literature of the long Nineteenth Century: both Romantic and Victorian, both poetry and the novel. Other areas of interest include German classical literature (especially Goethe and Schiller), aesthetic theory, war and literature, and genre theory.

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