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The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature
Author(s): Franco Moretti (Author)
- Publisher: Verso Books
- Publication Date: 5 Aug. 2014
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 9781781683040
- ISBN-13: 9781781683040
Book Description
”The bourgeois… Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. ‘I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals,’ wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois ‘opinions and ideals’ – what are they?” Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature – a major new analysis of the once-dominant culture and its literary decline and fall. Moretti’s gallery of individual portraits is entwined with the analysis of specific keywords – ‘useful’ and ‘earnest,’ ‘efficiency,’ ‘influence,’ ‘comfort,’ ‘roba’ – and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. From the ‘working master’ of the opening chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the ‘national malformations’ of the Southern and Eastern periphery, and the radical self-critique of Ibsen’s twelve-play cycle, the book charts the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and for its current irrelevance.
Editorial Reviews
Review
The great iconoclast of literary criticism. –John Sutherland, Guardian
It’s a rare literary critic who attracts so much public attention, and there’s a good reason: few are as hellbent on rethinking the way we talk about literature. –Times Literary Supplement
Moretti’s The Bourgeois is an illuminating, data-rich analysis of a fraught and nuanced null set. –New Inquiry
About the Author
Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World and Modern Epic, all from Verso.
