Squaring the Circle: A Literary History

We examine how three authors, Dante Alighieri, Margaret Cavendish, and James Joyce, employed allusions to the classical problem of squaring the circle, i.e., using only a compass and a straightedge to construct a square whose area equals that of a given circle. These discussions will be against the background of what was known mathematically about solving the problem when they wrote—respectively, in the fourteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth centuries. We will also discuss, as best as can be determined, what each author believed, knew, or could have known about the mathematical status of the problem and what this reveals about their use of the construction in their writings.