Literature and Contingency

Christina Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Director of the Humanities Research Institute, at the University of Warwick, UK. She works on the theory of the book, and the history of reading from the eighteenth century to the present. Her recent book, Reading and the Making of Time (2018), looks at reading as an activity that is both materially defined by the codex format, and politically tied up with the history of work and leisure.Carsten Meiner is Professor of French Literature and Culture at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He works on the critical articulations of typical French cultural phenomena, such as rebellions, gallantry, gastronomy, and intellectualism in French literary history. He is the director of the research project "Cultures of Topology: French literary history" at the University of Copenhagen. His publications include Les Mutations de la clarté (2007), Le Carrosse littéraire. L’Invention du hasard (2008), and The Cultural Life of Catastrophes (2012).

• Introduction: Literature and Contingency 1. ‘L’essentiel, c’est la contingence’: how literature does and does not cope with contingency 2. Accidental gods: figures of contingency in the enlightenment fable 3. Contingency in philosophy and history, 1650-1800 4. War atmospheres 5. Contingency in/of the text: Aristotle, Hardy, Perec 6. ‘Without you, I am nothing’: on the counterfactual imagination in Emma 7. The moment of truth: Proust, Barthes, and the contingency of old age 8. Luck stories: stress-testing contingency and agency at the margins of post-war American literature 9. Poetics of contingency