Daniel Williams

My research addresses British literature of the long 19th century in relation to science, philosophy, and intellectual history. I also maintain a commitment to the literature of South and Southern Africa. My main project (described in detail below) is about uncertainty, in its many literary and scientific forms. I have also written on meteorology, theories of freedom, evolutionary theory and its opponents, animal ethics, and other topics that join 19th-century literature to its scientific and philosophical kin.

My current project explores how nineteenth-century novelists envisioned thinking, judging, and acting in conditions of imperfect knowledge. I place novels against historical developments in mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and jurisprudence to argue that William Thackeray, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy generated distinctive aesthetic and affective responses to uncertainty. I anchor these novelists in nineteenth-century intellectual contexts with which they were familiar, including the transition from associationism to an embodied picture of psychology and motivation; the rise of statistical thinking and calculative rationality; the renewal of inductive methods in the sciences; and approaches to probability as a concept whose various senses converge. I spotlight how novels interact with cultural domains of uncertain knowledge, from gambling to weather forecasting to legal decision. Articulating a phenomenology of uncertainty that is shaped by, yet often resistant to, the nascent sciences of prediction and calculation in the period, novels attend to the felt effects, aesthetic repercussions, and emotional tonality of judging and acting without certain knowledge. I argue that they refract their environing contexts with striking consequences for narrative form, aesthetic theory, and generic commitment. And I claim that they deepen their approaches to scientific knowledge and social concern with a focus on what uncertainty looks and feels like as a subjective experience: on speculations that run against the grain of fact (Thackeray); hesitations that almost entirely usurp action (Eliot); legal judgments and verdicts that lack finality and proof (Collins); and forms of repetition and aggregation that we use in everyday inference (Hardy). Affective dimensions of uncertainty mediate between the scales of concept and experience: Thackeray’s counterfactual imaginary probes the emotional tone of speculations about alternative realities; Eliot’s interest in theories of decision meets with hesitation as a practical attitude and bodily experience; Collins’ exploration of legal uncertainty is shadowed by the psychology of suspicion; and Hardy’s deployment of logical and statistical models consorts with sensation and intuition. Throughout I draw connections between these styles of uncertain thinking and literary reading, offering updated accounts of inference, evidence, and especially probability—as numerical concept, epistemic conundrum, legal tool, and rhetorical protocol.
Address: United States