‘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.
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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