Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One
Probably Poe

Chapter Two
Moby-Dick and the Opposite of Providence


Chapter Three
Doubting If Doubt Itself Be Doubting: After Moby-Dick

Chapter Four
Douglass' Long Run

Chapter Five
Roughly Thoreau

Chapter Six
Dickinson's Precarious Steps, Surprising Leaps, and Bounds

Coda
Lost Causes and the Civil War

About the Author

Maurice S. Lee is Associate Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830-1860 and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass.

Reviews

"[An] erudite...densely informative study." --The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin
"Uncertain Chances is an adventurous, learned, and powerfully argued inquiry into the manifold ways in which the ideas of chance, indeterminacy, and probability energized the thinking of the most prominent authors of the antebellum era. Over and again well-known texts and authors appear in a surprising new light." --Eric Sundquist, Johns Hopkins University
"Impressively wide-ranging and erudite, Uncertain Chances presents an original account of how antebellum American writers used chance to come to terms with doubt. Unlike the usual historical narrative, Lee's study persuasively argues that nineteenth-century America's exploration of the problem of doubt and the solution of probability was well underway before the Civil War and the pragmatism of Pierce, James, and Dewey." --Gregg Crane, University of
Michigan
"In this trenchant, wide-ranging, and witty book, Maurice Lee analyzes the intellectual affinity between Poe, Melville, Thoreau, Douglass, and Dickinson--who grappled with uncertainty--and the later philosophical pragmatism of writers such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Showing continuity, not simply disruption, across the Civil War, Lee rewrites nineteenth-century American literary and intellectual history." --Samuel Otter, University of
California, Berkeley
"Lee's theoretical sophistication and clear, direct prose proves a winning combination that will likely satisfy all readers...Essential." --Choice