book: Chaos Imagined
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Chaos Imagined

Literature, Art, Science
  • Martin Meisel
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2016
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About this book

Martin Meisel considers the long effort to conjure, depict, and rationalize extreme disorder, with all the passions, excitements, and compromises the act has provoked. He builds a rough history from major social, psychological, and cosmological turning points in the imagining of chaos, particularly exploring the remarkable shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from conceiving of chaos as disruptive to celebrating its liberating and energizing potential.
A sweeping historical and intellectual genealogy of our struggle to represent disorder from the classical period to the twentieth century.

Author / Editor information

Martin Meisel is Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature Emeritus at Columbia University. He is the author of Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater and Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts of the Nineteenth Century.

Reviews

[An] ambitious multidisciplinary work.

David Helfand, author of A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age:
This exhilarating masterpiece can only have emerged from a mind steeped in physics as an undergraduate and theater as a graduate student, followed by the broadest explorations in a lifetime of scholarship. The world may have emerged from the quantum 'chaos' of the Big Bang, but Meisel has ordered everything since beautifully.

Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University:
This extraordinary, encyclopedic exploration of how artists, poets, philosophers, and scientists have imagined and represented chaos explores not chaos in the abstract but those crucial transitions to (and from) chaos that are so intricately represented in the most complex artworks. The unpredictable is then made not predictable but endlessly fascinating. Martin Meisel's is a bravura performance, one of those rare critical studies not for one but for all seasons.

Edward Mendelson, Columbia University:
Meisel's magnum opus is a heroic act of defiance against its own subject matter: an enlightening, judicious, cohesive history of three millennia of thought about the terrors and attractions of chaos. The book moves with steady confidence through literature, science, art, and philosophy, illuminating many varieties of darkness and finding convincing and original connections across centuries and continents. With authority and energy, Meisel creates a whole new field of study.

Ross Hamilton, Barnard College:
Meisel has a unique perspective, remarkable command of examples, and astute use of etymologies. His discussions of Sophocles, Calderon, Chekhov, Beckett, and Stoppard are matched by equally detailed and thoughtful considerations of graphics by Otto Dix, the landscapes of Turner, War and Peace, Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and Haydn's Creation.


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An Untethered Epilogue
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The One and The Many
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 5, 2016
eBook ISBN:
9780231540469
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
608
Illustrations:
96
Other:
96 b&w illustrations
Downloaded on 13.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.7312/meis16632/html
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