Essai
Nouvelle parution
F. Moretti, The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture

F. Moretti, The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture

Publié le par Julien Desrochers

 

MORETTI, Franco (ed.), The Novel, volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, Princeton University Press, 2006, 928 p.

 

ISBN: 0-691-04947-5

 

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 1: History, Geography, and Culture, looks at the novel mostly from the outside, treating the transition from oral to written storytelling and the rise of narrative and fictionality, and covering the ancient Greek novel, the novel in premodern China, the early Spanish novel, and much else, including readings of novels from around the world.

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

Franco Moretti is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World, Modern Epic, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900, and Graphs, Maps, Trees.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

On The Novel 

1.1. A STRUGGLE FOR SPACE

From Oral to Written: An Anthropological Breakthrough in Storytelling by JACK GOODY

The Control of the Imagination and the Novel by LUIZ COSTA LIMA 

Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture by HENRY Y. H. ZHAO 

The Novel on Trial by WALTER SITI

1.2. POLYGENESIS

The Ancient Greek Novel: A Single Model or a Plurality of Forms? by TOMAS HÄGG

Medieval French Romance by ALBERTO VARVARO

The Novel in Premodern China by ANDREW H. PLAKS

Critical Apparatus: The Semantic Field of "Narrative"
Stefano Levi Della Torre, Midrash
Maurizio Bettini, Mythos/Fabula
Adriana Boscaro, Monogatari
Judith T. Zeitlin, Xiaoshuo
Abdelfattah Kilito, Qisa
Piero Boitani, Romance
Maria Di Salvo, Povest'

1.3. THE EUROPEAN ACCELERATION

The Short, Happy Life of the Novel in Spain by JOAN RAMON RESINA 

Forms of Popular Narrative in France and England: 1700-1900 by DANIEL COUGNAS

The Rise of Fictionality by CATHERINE GALLAGHER

Serious Century by FRANCO MORETTI 

The Ruse of the Russian Novel by WILLIAM MILLS TODD III

1.4. THE CIRCLE WIDENS

Critical Apparatus: The Market for Novels-Some Statistical Profiles
James Raven, Britain, 1750-1830
John Austin, United States, 1780-1850
Giovanni Ragone, Italy, 1815-1870
Elisa Martí-López and Mario Santana, Spain, 1843-1900
Priya Joshi, India, 1850-1900
Jonathan Zwicker, Japan, 1850-1900
Wendy Griswold, Nigeria, 1950-2000

The Sign of the Voice: Orality and Writing in the United States by ALESSANDRO PORTELLI 

The Long Nineteenth Century of the Japanese Novel by JONATHAN ZWICKER 

Epic and Novel in India by MEENAKSHI MUKHERJEE 

The Novel of a Continent: Latin America by GERALD MARTIN

The Extroverted African Novel by EILEEN JULIEN

1.5. TOWARD WORLD LITERATURE

The Novelists' International by MICHAEL DENNING 

Fecundities of the Unexpected: Magical Realism, Narrative, and History by ATO QUAYSON

Readings: Traditions in Contact

Abdelfattah Kilito, Al-Saq `ala al-saq f im a huwa al-Faryaq
(Ahmad Faris Shidya q, Paris, 1855)
Norma Field, Drifting Clouds (Futabatei Shimei, Japan, 1887-1889)
Jale Parla, A Carriage Affair (Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem, Turkey, 1896)
Jongyon Hwang, The Heartless (Yi Kwangsu, Korea, 1917)
M. Keith Booker, Chaka (Thomas Mofolo, South Africa, 1925)
M. R. Ghanoonparvar, The Blind Owl (Sadeq Hedayat, Iran, 1941)

Readings: Americas

Alessandro Portelli, Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, United States, 1852)
Roberto Schwarz, Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas ( J. M. Machado de Assis, Brazil, 1880)
Jonathan Arac, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, United States, 1884)
Ernesto Franco, Pedro Páramo ( Juan Rulfo, Mexico, 1955)
Stephanie Merrim, Grande Sertão: Veredas ( João Guimarães Rosa, Brazil, 1956)
José Miguel Oviedo, The Death of Artemio Cruz (Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, 1962)
Clarisse Zimra, Lone Sun (Daniel Maximin, Guadeloupe, 1981)
Alessandro Portelli, Beloved (Toni Morrison, United States, 1987)

Contributors

Author Index

Works Cited Index