F. Moretti, The Novel, vol. 2: Forms and Themes

MORETTI, Franco (ed.), The Novel, vol. 2: Forms and Themes, Princeton University Press, 2006, 944 p.

ISBN : 0-691-04948-3

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 2: Forms and Themes, views the novel primarily from the inside, examining its many formal arrangements and recurrent thematic manifestations, and looking at the plurality of the genre and its lineages.

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

2.1. THE LONG DURATION

The Novel in Search of Itself: A Historical Morphology by THOMAS PAVEL

Epic, Novel by MASSIMO FUSILLO

The Poetry of Mediocrity by SYLVIE THOREL-CAILLETEAU

The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism by FREDRIC JAMESON

Readings: Prototypes

Massimo Fusillo, Aethiopika (Heliodorus, Third or Fourth Century)
Abdelfattah Kilito, Maqa¯ma¯ t(Hamadha¯nÿFD¯, Late Tenth Century)
Francisco Rico, Lazarillo de Tormes ("Lázaro de Tormes," circa 1553)
Thomas DiPiero, Le Grand Cyrus (Madeleine de Scudéry, 1649-1653)
Perry Anderson, Persian Letters (Montesquieu, 1721)
Ian Duncan, Waverley (Walter Scott, 1814)
Paolo Tortonese, The Mysteries of Paris (Eugène Sue, 1842-1843)
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, The War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells, 1898)
Ambrosio Fornet, The Kingdom of This World (Alejo Carpentier, 1949)

2.2. WRITING PROSE

Forms of the Supernatural in Narrative by FRANCESCO ORLANDO

The Prose of the World by MICHAL PELED GINSBURG AND LORRI G. NANDREA

Excess and History in Hugo's Ninety-three by UMBERTO ECO

Minor Characters by ALEX WOLOCH

324 Toward a Database of Novelistic Topoi by NATHALIE FERRAND

2.3. THEMES, FIGURES

The Fiction of Bourgeois Morality and the Paradox of Individualism by NANCY ARMSTRONG

The Death of Lucien de Rubempré by A. S. BYATT

A Portrait of the Artist as a Social Climber: Upward Mobility in the Novel by BRUCE ROBBINS

A Businessman in Love by FREDRIC JAMESON

Readings: Narrating Politics

Benedict Anderson, Max Havelaar (Multatuli, 1860)
Luisa Villa, The Tiger of Malaysia (Emilio Salgari, 1883-1884)
Edoarda Masi, Ah Q (Lu Hsün, 1921-1922)
Thomas Lahusen, Cement (Fedor Gladkov, 1925)
Piergiorgio Bellocchio, A Private Matter (Beppe Fenoglio, 1963)
Simon Gikandi, Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964)
José Miguel Oviedo, Conversation in the Cathedral (Mario Vargas Llosa, 1969)
Klaus R. Scherpe, The Aesthetics of Resistance (Peter Weiss, 1975-1981)

Readings: The Sacrifice of the Heroine

April Alliston, Aloisa and Melliora (Love in Excess, Eliza Haywood, 1719-1720)
Juliet Mitchell, Natasha and Hélène (War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, 1863-1869)
Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, Nana (Nana, Émile Zola, 1880)
Valentine Cunningham, Tess (Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy, 1891)
Peter Madsen, Elsie (The Dangerous Age, Karin Michaëlis, 1910)

2.4. SPACE AND STORY

Over-writing as Un-writing: Descriptions, World-Making, and Novelistic Time by MIEKE BAL

The Roads of the Novel by HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT

The Chronotopes of the Sea by MARGARET COHEN

Torn Space: James Joyce's Ulysses by PHILIP FISHER

Readings: The New Metropolis

Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai (Midnight, Mao Dun, 1932)
Ernesto Franco, Buenos Aires (Adán Buenosayres, Leopoldo Marechal, 1948)
Ernest Emenyonu, Lagos (People of the City, Cyprian Ekwensi, 1954)
Roger Allen, Cairo (The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz, 1956-1957)
Ardis L. Nelson, Havana (Three Trapped Tigers, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 1967)
Homi Bhabha, Bombay (Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie, 1981)
Sibel Irzik, Istanbul (The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk, 1990)

2.5. UNCERTAIN BOUNDARIES

Form and Chance: The German Novella by ANDREAS GAILUS

Inconceivable History: Storytelling as Hyperphasia and Disavowal by FRANCIS MULHERN

Innovation: Notes on Nihilism and the Aesthetics of the Novel by JOHN BRENKMAN

Narrative Literature in the Turing Universe by ESPEN AARSETH

Readings: A Century of Experiments

Andreina Lavagetto, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910)
Myra Jehlen, The Making of Americans (Gertrude Stein, 1925)
Ann Banfield, Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)
José Luiz Passos, Macunaíma (Mário de Andrade, 1928)
Seamus Deane, Finnegans Wake ( James Joyce, 1939)
Declan Kiberd, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (Samuel Beckett, 1951-1953)
Beatriz Sarlo, Hopscotch ( Julio Cortázar, 1963)
Ursula K. Heise, Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon, 1973)

Contributors

Author Index

Works Cited Index