The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes

Il romanzo #2

by Franco Moretti (Editor)

Nearly as global in its ambition and sweep as its subject, Franco Moretti's The Novel is a watershed event in the understanding of the first truly planetary literary form. A translated selection from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo (2001-2003), The Novel' s two volumes are a unified multiauthored reference work, containing more than one hundred specially commissioned essays by leading contemporary critics from around the world. Providing the first international comparative reassessment of the novel, these essential volumes reveal the form in unprecedented depth and breadth--as a great cultural, social, and human phenomenon that stretches from the ancient Greeks to today, where modernity itself is unimaginable without the genre.


By viewing the novel as much more than an aesthetic form, this landmark collection demonstrates how the genre has transformed human emotions and behavior, and the very perception of reality. Historical, statistical, and formal analyses show the novel as a complex literary system, in which new forms proliferate in every period and place.


Volume 2: Forms and Themes , views the novel primarily from the inside, examining its many formal arrangements and recurrent thematic manifestations, and looking at the plurality of the genre and its lineages.


These books will be essential reading for all students and scholars of literature.

Genres: Criticism, Theory, Books About Books, Nonfiction

960 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Franco Moretti is an Italian literary scholar, trained as a Marxist critic, whose work focuses on the history of the novel as a "planetary form". He has written five books, Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (1998), and Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005). His recent work is notable for importing, not without controversy, quantitative methods from the social sciences into domains that have traditionally belonged to the humanities. To date, his books have been translated into fifteen languages.

Moretti has recently edited a five-volume encyclopedia of the novel, entitled Il Romanzo (2004), featuring articles by a wide range of experts on the genre from around the world. It is available in a two-volume English language edition (Princeton UP, 2006).

Moretti earned his doctorate in modern literature from the University of Rome in 1972, graduating summa cum laude. He was professor of comparative literature at Columbia University before being appointed to the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professorship at Stanford University. There, he founded the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel. He has given the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton, and the Beckman Lectures at the University of California-Berkeley. In 2006, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a frequent contributor to the New Left Review and a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based group of radical intellectuals. He is also a scientific adviser to the French Ministry of Research.

Reviews

[Justin Evans]

I want to get through this, and I want to write an informative review. Of course, it's almost 1000 pages long, so I decided to break it into three bits and update the review.

Part 1: 'The Long Duration,' 'Writing Prose.'

Two immediate problems: the translators must have been working under time constraints, because the essays written originally in not-English are unreadable. Alternatively, the original is unreadable. Quite possible, as we are dealing with contemporary literary critics. Second, the essays are impossibly hip and trendy. Heliodorus of Emesa (an ancient Greek 'novelist') gets plenty of ink in these early sections - more than Cervantes even. Does anyone care about ancient Greek 'novels,' outside of classicists and literary scholars? Probably not.

By far the best essay of these opening section is Pavel's 'Historical Morphology.' Despite its title, it is quite readable, an informative analysis of the history of the novel as an investigation of the individual's place in the world, and 'morality' in the broadest possible sense. Fusillo discusses the relation between novel and epic (a topic close to my heart) in the most tortuous, jargon-ridden prose this side of the narratologists who apparently influenced and or taught him. Thorel-Cailleteau discusses the novel's formal characteristics in relation to its 'thematics,' that is, what the novel tends to be about. Not bad. Jameson's 'Experiments of Time' is an anatomy of happy endings. It isn't really up to his usual standard, but his argument that a happy ending might be an indictment of the contemporary world, rather than assimilation to it, is fun.

The 'Readings' within 'The Long Duration' deal with various prototypes: the realist novel (Heliodorus, of course); Maqamat; the picaresque (Lazarillo); the romance (Le Grand Cyrus); the epistolary novel (Persian Letters); the historical novel (Waverley); the serial novel (The Mysteries of Paris); science fiction (War of the Worlds); and magical realism (The Kingdom of This World). The readings of the ubiquitous Heliodorus, Lazaro, and Eugene Sue are best skipped. I knew nothing about Maqamat, a medieval arabic fictional form before reading this book, and the essay on it was informative and readable. Thanks to the others, I actually have the desire to read Waverley, PL, and KotW (this latter, though, despite the critic rather than because of him). Imagine that: literary criticism which makes you *want* to read novels!!

The second section is 'Writing Prose,' but the essays aren't as obviously linked as they are in the Long Duration. 'The Prose of the World' is probably the best here, although Eco's reflections on Victor Hugo are worth a laugh. I sense, from the first third of this volume, that the essays will generally be far too long (as is the wont of us academics), poorly written/translated, and occasionally interesting, while the 'Readings' - which were obviously intended to be shorter and actually about books - will be generally more fun and informative. Time will tell.

[Nico]

I'm really excited about these...just out in paperback

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

The longer essays aren't quite as interesting as those in v1, but the brief essays on specific works are uniformly excellent.