EAN: 9783110765977

RISK AND THE ENGLISH NOVEL BUCHREIHE DER ANGL...

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.

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