Figures of Chance I: Chance in Literature and the Arts (16th–21st Centuries) proposes a multidisciplinary analysis that will serve as a reference work on cultural phenomena related to the evolution of representations of chance and contingency. This text measures what the projective and predictive capacity of societies owes, from the beginnings of the modern age, to their representation and/or cultural modeling of reality, insofar as this reality is understood to be contingent. This volume examines the evolution of artistic and literary representations of chance, from the early modern period to the present times. Written by recognized specialists of each of the periods studied, it identifies and historicizes the main fictional and factual modes of representing chance, as they appear in artistic representations of contingency in the West.