Henderson A.K. Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. — 231 p. — ISBN: 978-0-19-880998-2.Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. The nineteenth century was a moment of extraordinary mathematical innovation, witnessing the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the revaluation of symbolic algebra, and the importation of mathematical language into philosophy. All these innovations sprang from a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice--as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. For Victorian mathematicians, the value of a claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. This concern with formal structure produced a striking convergence between mathematics and aesthetics: geometers wrote fables, logicians reconceived symbolism, and physicists described reality as consisting of beautiful patterns.
Artists, meanwhile, drawing upon the cultural prestige of mathematics, conceived their work as a 'science' of form, whether as lines in a painting, twinned characters in a novel, or wavelike stress patterns in a poem. Avant-garde photographs and paintings, fantastical novels like Flatland and Lewis Carroll's children's books, and experimental poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, and Patmore created worlds governed by a rigorous internal logic even as they were pointedly unconcerned with reference or realist protocols. Algebraic Art shows that works we tend to regard as outliers to mainstream Victorian culture were expressions of a mathematical formalism that was central to Victorian knowledge production and that continues to shape our understanding of the significance of form.List of IllustrationsGeometry. Math for Math’s Sake: Non-Euclidean Geometry and Aestheticism
Algebra. Symbolic Logic and the Logic of Symbolism
Analysis. Magic Mirrors: Formalist Realism in Victorian Physics and Photography
Analogy. The Physics and Poetics of Analogy
Invariant Forms.
“[T]he bonds of verse”: Form as Discipline
Coda: “[T]o bury Euclid deep in the living flesh”
Works Cited
Index