The Bourgeois
Between History and Literature
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"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?
Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature, where a gallery of individual portraits is entwined around the analysis of specific keywords – such as ‘useful’ and ‘earnest’, ‘efficiency’, ‘influence’, ‘comfort’, ‘roba’ – and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. The book charts the rise and fall of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical
weakness, and searches for the seeds of its failures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First named in the 11th century, the bourgeois class established a dominant presence in world literature starting in the 1700s, as this brief but incisive critical study indicates. Starting with Robinson Crusoe, Moretti shows how conservative middle-class values and their incarnation in character types began to appear in fiction and poetry, shaping the structure of narrative. Crusoe, a model of human industry and the nascent capitalist spirit, sees his island world only in terms of what is "useful" to his endeavors. Moretti dissects Defoe's grammar and syntax, finding it consistent with the efficiency of Crusoe's character: "Defoe's sentences take the successful ending of an action... and turn it into the premise for another action." Looking to Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, and other 19th-century classics, Moretti sees novels dominated by "fillers" details of daily life that convey a sense of "regularity" and descriptions that are increasingly "analytical, impersonal, perhaps even impartial.' " Moretti buttresses his argument with observations from Weber, Luk cs, Gramsci, and other theorists, and extends his study to the novels of Machado, G ldos, Prus, and others. Moretti persuasively demonstrates that his interpretations can be applied broadly to the vast body of 18th- and 19th-century literature.