CHARTING MANIFOLDS: SCIENCE FICTION, MATHEMATICS, AND EMPIRE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract

The dissertation is a multidisciplinary study of science fiction and the cultural history of mathematics at the turn of the twentieth century. While literary critics have acknowledged the involvement of mathematical knowledge and thinking in the geographical and economic expansion of European empires in the long nineteenth century, they have yet to examine mathematics as a language and narrative of anti-imperialism. In “Charing Manifolds,” I argue that, through mathematical concepts, metaphors, analogies, structures, and ideologies, major science fiction writers like Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Kurd Lasswitz, and Olaf Stapledon challenged and revised the colonial rhetoric of European scientific and technological advancement and envisioned a global political federation or integration of nation-states. The above writers’ plotting and modelling of alternative political possibilities and the accompanying experimentation with literary forms and genres can only be placed into focus with close attention to the historical developments of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mathematics.