A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought

Kern's The Culture of Time and Space remains one of the defining New Historicist treatments of modernist literature and culture. This ambitious book aims to describe the evolution of thought about cause and effect from 1830 (when Victoria ascended the throne) to 2000, with murder as the paradigm""act"" used to compare theories of causality, and with a heavy reliance on literature as evidence of cultural belief. The analysis turns on a conceit derived from one of the major ideational innovations of the period in question: quantum mechanics. Kern, professor of history at Ohio State, notes that quantum mechanics itself, as a theory, can be interpreted as confounding notions of causality. He thus treats causality in terms of a""specificity-uncertainty dialectic,"" whereby, in seemingly contradictory fashion, the last 170 or so years appear to move toward""increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability and uncertainty of causal understanding."" He looks at ideas of causality in murders, or explanations of murders, in which the following basic factors play a role, each treated in its own chapter: ancestry, childhood, language, sexuality, emotion, mind, society, ideas. Each of these is an enormous field of inquiry in and of itself, and Kern's analysis doesn't always yield a sharply defined path. But his focus on murder keeps things pleasantly lurid, and his erudition and passion shine through on every page, like a crime scene treated with luminol.