In this groundbreaking book, Franco Moretti argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. In place of the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, Moretti offers charts, maps and time lines, developing the idea of ‘distant reading’ into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, in which the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres-the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel-as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.
About the author
Franco Moretti is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford, where he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab. He writes regularly for New Left Review and is a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is the author of, among other books, Far Country, The Bourgeois and Graphs, Maps, Trees. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His book Distant Reading won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
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