The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature - Softcover

"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 is already famous in bookish circles for his data-centric approach to novels, which he graphs, maps, and charts ... if his new methods catch on, they could change the way we look at literary history." - Wired "Moretti's The Bourgeois is an illuminating, data-rich analysis of a fraught and nuanced null set." - New Inquiry

"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.