What are the odds that a scholarly study of nineteenth-century American literary works in relation to mathematics and probability, religious belief and practice, economics, popular culture, the history of science and philosophy would successfully engage those domains – and their usually mutually exclusive practitioners and audiences – individually and in every possible combination and do so in a prose text that is not only intellectually rich and artfully argued, but personably witty and a delight to read? Virtually nil, most readers might wager; yet those who take that bet – and take up this book – will have a chance to win big.

Uncertain Chances offers a fascinating model for effective interdisciplinary scholarship. A keen reader across numerous fields and disciplines, Lee respectfully, eclectically and pragmatically draws upon diverse materials, methods and methodologies to create original and insightful case studies of how Poe, Melville, Douglass, Thoreau and Dickinson joined other contemporary thinkers in an array of debates concerning concepts of chance, fate, probability, risk, predictability, knowledge, doubt, and uncertainty.

Modeling personal curiosity, empathy, and intellectual excitement, in the Introduction Lee skillfully establishes his own authorial voice, presenting himself as an experienced and trustworthy scholar and teacher, well prepared to guide his audience through this complex subject and its even more complex historical and cultural contexts. As he modestly understates, “to read nineteenth-century American literature with an eye toward chance is to broach some unfamiliar questions that turn out to have broad interpretative use” (3). And how – as his efficient survey of the historical, scientific, economic, linguistic, religious, moral, political, philosophical and aesthetic implications of the concept and a host of interrelated terms soon suggests. In the process, while carefully cognizant of the traps of teleological and totalizing narrative, he also considers the roles these concepts played in various constructions of modernity; theories of reason/rationality; human psychology and neuroscience; aesthetic and critical concerns with the Gothic, Romanticism, and Realism; interdisciplinary literature and science studies; the rise of skepticism and pragmatism; and the American Civil War.

In all of the book's six main chapters, Lee practices what his authors preach by tailoring his critical approaches and analyses to the style/content/contexts of their engagement with their own lives and times and subject matter. In each case, he draws – as each author did – upon a “pre-disciplinary” narrative mix of literary aesthetics, natural history and philosophy to explore, observe, examine, describe, and explain various manifestations of chance and epistemological uncertainty as they were likely to have experienced them and, in turn, used them to construct their own significant narratives within short stories, epic prose, autobiography, essays and speeches, natural history, and poetry.

In the first chapter, Lee explores the rise of probability theory in the first half of the nineteenth century and how Poe's philosophical and aesthetic engagement with the “odds and the odd” is pragmatically deployed within his detective fiction (15). In the second chapter, he examines Melville's experimentation with fate and free will in Moby-Dick read against the possibilities of providence; theological and epistemological skepticism; and the sciences of meteorology, oceanography, and navigation In the third, he analyzes the “radical pragmatism” of Melville's narratives of moral choice, action, and chance in Pierre and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

Chapter 4 takes a new tack, changing the connotation of the term “chance” to describe and explain Douglass's political and philosophical arguments about the statistical “chances” of African Americans in the “race of life.” In the fifth chapter, Lee observes Thoreau observing in Walden, his journals and scientific texts, with special attention to the ways that his “radical empiricism” and “probabilistic pursuit” of natural investigation and knowledge connect his aesthetic and scientific work. The final full chapter offers a surprising new take on Dickinson's philosophical understanding of chance, probability, the limits of knowing, the impossibility of perfect prediction and her poet challenge to the argument from design.

The volume closes with a brief Coda, “Lost Causes and the Civil War,” which serves as an allusive and elusive conclusion (reminiscent of a similar aesthetic/critical move by Agee and Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) that lays out the evidence for coincidence, contingency, and convergence in human history and politics (not to mention the scholarly life of the mind).

Lee's exegetical method of meeting each text and its author where he finds them in time and space – first, their own and then the many various contextual places their works traveled through on their way into ours – yields new readings that are cogent, plausible, original, and considerate of both self/other and the limits of knowing either. His work also provides an inspiring example of the interpretative power of a highly self-conscious thinker to craft an interdisciplinary study by sharing what he thinks – and how he thinks he got to thinking it. In examining our attempts to make meaning and narrative out of the random and imperfectly predictable, Uncertain Chances is a long shot that pays off – and probably inadvertently reinforces the falsifiable but effective marketing of such scholarly lotteries: you have to play to win. Side note to Oxford University Press: a text this rich and expansive with such a treasure-trove of footnotes deserves not to be printed in such an uncomfortably small “shrunk-to-fit” size type.