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Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900

01 Jan 1998-
TL;DR: Moretti as mentioned in this paper explored the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel and found that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history, in a series of one hundred maps, alongside Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels of ideas.
Abstract: In a series of one hundred maps, Franco Moretti explores the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel. Balzac's Paris, Dickens's London and Scott's Scottish Lowlands are mapped, alongside the territories of Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels of ideas, in a path-breaking study which suggests that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history.
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01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: The Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez (1996) as discussed by the authors traced their lineage forwards in time from the 1920's to magic realism, and backwards, through Wagner and Melville and others, to Goethe's Faust, which was composed between 1770 and 1830, during one of the great expansions of the capitalist world system.
Abstract: friend brought me the first volume of The Modern World-System, I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European WorldEconomy in the Sixteenth Century ( Wallers tein, 1974) from the United States in the late 1970's; the book made an enormous impression on me, and I remember wondering how it could affect, and change, the study of literature. But I found an answer only several years later, when I realized that world-systems analysis offered a very good way to account for the mix of "all-inclusiveness" and chaos which had often been noticed in Modernist texts (Ulysses, The Waste Land, Cantos . . .), but never truly explained. In the light of world-systems analysis, this strange combination could be recognized as an attempt to represent a world which had simultaneously become one (whence the all-inclusiveness), but full of disparities and contradictions (whence the chaos). "World texts," I called these works, and in a book called The Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez (1996) (the epic is the literary genre of totality), I traced their lineage forwards in time from the 1920's to magic realism, and backwards, through Wagner and Melville and others, to Goethe's Faust, which was composed between 1770 and 1830, during one of the great expansions of the capitalist world-system. The first contribution of world-systems analysis to literary history, then, was this: it allowed us to "see" a new literary genreand not just any genre, but the one trying to represent the world as a totality: a possibility that our discipline had never even envisioned, because it lacked the concepts to do so. (When I presented my thesis at Harvard, around 1990, the organizers turned the title of my talk into "Word texts," without the "1," so odd must have seemed the

13 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
26 Nov 2018
TL;DR: The authors traces some of the historical reasons for this state of the field, or fields, of narratology, pinpointing spots in classical, post-classical and contemporary narrative theory where compensation was attempted or is being made through a focus on space instead of time.
Abstract: Abstract Narrative has often been considered “an art of time.” This essay traces some of the historical reasons for this state of the field, or fields, of narratology, pinpointing spots in classical, postclassical and contemporary narrative theory where compensation was attempted or is being made through a focus on space instead of time. It suggests that as geography and geographers have become increasingly interested in narrative approaches in dealing with concepts, visualization, and digitalization, it is perhaps (once again) time narratology itself, while continuing to focus on and explore space and place, took account of its history of treating them and looked at how geography has implemented narratological concepts in its technical and philosophical approaches.

13 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors look at books as both cultural products and physical objects and propose new perspectives for a study of translation as part of world history, using case studies from the transmission of Russian books to China, a German language collection of stories by the Russian writer Mikhail Artsybashev and a Modern Library anthology of Russian short stories in English, as illustrations of the ways in which transnational translation practices mediate between the book as object, as cultural-symbolic artifact in motion, and as text.
Abstract: Like other commodities, books have both a material and a sociosymbolic life, whose inherent integration has been too often ignored. Comparative literature and transla­tion studies do not grant sufficient importance to the physical life of the book. Analyses of translation often fail to acknowledge that the (historical) journey by which the book traveled forms an important part of the mental worlds and symbolic mutations that it provokes and undergoes once transported. Scholars of book history, paying much attention to the materiality of the book, usually track a book's existence only within its original language environment. While cultural anthropology and geography offer the best models for bringing a fuller and richer history of the book into world-historical focus, scholars of consumption and material culture have yet to add books to their lists of circulating commodities. By looking at books as both cultural products and physical objects, this article proposes new perspectives for a study of translation as part of world history. Two case studies from the transmission of Russian books to China, a German-language collection of stories by the Russian writer Mikhail Artsybashev and a Modern Library anthology of Russian short stories in English, are offered as illustrations of the ways in which transnational translation practices mediate between the book as object, as cultural-symbolic artifact in motion, and as text.

13 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines Pascale Casanova's recent theorization of the world literary space from the point of view of post-colonial and especially post-Cold War debates on global literary comparativism.
Abstract: This article critically examines Pascale Casanova's recent theorization of the world literary space from the point of view of postcolonial and especially post‐Cold War debates on global literary comparativism. It investigates whether her Bourdieu‐derived ‘field’ approach, with its overwhelming conceptual dependence on ‘market’ and ‘nation’ metaphors, equips her to make valid qualitative judgements on vast swathes of ‘non‐European’ and ‘transnational’ literary spaces. In annexing all literatures of the non‐European, postcolonial world to a historiography of European literatures, Casanova's book, this article argues, is not well positioned to theorize contemporary forms of literary ‘worldling’ where Europe is but one node among many others and scarcely the ‘Greenwich Meridian’ of literary taste. Finally, the article discusses alternative ways of studying world literary spaces and histories that have emerged in recent years, especially in the works of David Damrosch and Franco Moretti. In the process, it als...

12 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Tony Bennett1
TL;DR: Moretti's use of statistics and techniques for visualizing the action of literary forms, and assesses their implications for the development of cultural sociology is discussed in this paper, where the authors compare their work with the work of Pierre Bourdieu.
Abstract: This paper reviews Franco Moretti's use of statistics and techniques for visualizing the action of literary forms, and assesses their implications for the development of cultural sociology. It compares Moretti's use of such methods with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, contrasting the principles of sociological analysis developed by Bourdieu with Moretti's preoccupation with the analysis of literary form as illustrated by his accounts of the development of the English novel and the role of clues in the organization of detective stories. His attempt to use evolutionary principles of explanation to account for the development of literary forms is probed by considering its similarities to earlier evolutionary accounts of the development of design traits. While welcoming the methodological challenge posed by Moretti's work, its lack of an adequate account of the role of literary institutions is criticized, as are the effects of the forms of abstraction that his analyses rest upon.

12 citations


Cites background from "Atlas of the European Novel 1800-19..."

  • ...For while Moretti acknowledges his debt to Bourdieu here (Moretti, 1998: 9), and while his maps sometimes rest on the same logic as Bourdieu’s, there are also differences, and it is the differences that I explore here....

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