John D. Lyons is Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of Virginia. He is the author or editor of 13 books including: Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton University Press, 1989), Kingdom of Disorder. The Theory of Tragedy in Seventeenth-Century France (Purdue University Press, 1999), Before Imagination. Embodied Thought From Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford University Press, 2005) and French Literature. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Eloquent and compelling, this is a noteworthy contribution to the field.

• Preface: The Phantom of Chance; Starting in the middle of things; The end of fortune and the rise of chance; Acknowledgements; Series Editor's Foreword; Introduction; The tradition of chance; Aristotle and the third type of event; Fortuna and casus; Boethius and the wheel of fortune; Machiavelli and the dissolution of fortune; Montaigne and the sceptical challenge; 1. Fortune, Mistress of Events: Corneille and the Poetics of Tragedy; Chance as cornerstone of poetics; Clitandre, and the poetics of gratuity; Le Cid and the management of chance; Miracles in everyday life; 2. God in a World of Chance: Pascal's Pensées and Lettres provinciales; The Random human condition; From probability to frequency in the Provinciales; The coming of the Messiah was not an effect of chance; When the game is over; 3. From Chance Events to Improbable Actions: Lafayette and the Novel; The shipwreck of romance; Everyday encounters; Silent Chance; 4. The God of Suspense: Bossuet's providential history and Racine's Athalie; God's anamorphic history; Racine's tragedy of errors; 5. An Accidental World: La Bruyère's Caractères; The Heart; Occasion; Love; Machines; Fashion; Index.