The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes

by Franco Moretti (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691134734
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	09/02/2007
Pages:	960
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes

---

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2006 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-691-04948-3

---

Chapter One

UMBERTO ECO

Excess and History in Hugo's Ninety-three

In 1902, a small review, L'Hermitage, asked two hundred French writers who their favorite poet was. André Gide replied, "Hugo, hélas!" Gide would have to go to great lengths in the years to come to explain his statement. In the present essay I am not particularly interested in this episode, since Gide was speaking of Hugo the poet, but his cry (of pain? disappointment? begrudging admiration?) weighs heavily on the shoulders of anyone who has ever been invited to judge Hugo the novelist-or even the author of a single novel. Such is the case with this revisitation of Ninety-three.

Alas (hélas!), however many shortcomings in the novel one can list and analyze, starting with its oratorical incontinence, the same defects appear splendid when we begin to delve into the wound with our scalpel. Like a worshiper of Bach and his disembodied, almost mental architecture, who discovers that Beethoven has achieved mightier tones than many more temperate harpsichords ever could-why fight the urge to surrender? Who could be immune to the power of the Fifth or Ninth Symphony?

Was Hugo the greatest French novelist of his century? With good reason you might prefer Stendhal, Balzac, orFlaubert. Reread Ninety-three, however, and you become enthralled by the power of excess. It is this attraction that we shall explore, in a book that, like Hugo's other novels, turns excess into a golden mean and thrills us through sheer excess. You could avoid entering a Pantagruelian feast, but once you are in the game, it makes no sense to recall your dietician's advice or to yearn for the delicate flavors of nouvelle cuisine. If you have the stomach to join in an orgy, the experience will be memorable. Otherwise it is better to leave immediately and fall asleep reading the aphorisms of an eighteenth-century gentleman. Hugo is not for the faint of heart. While the battle of the Hernani may be a belated form of Sturm und Drang, the shadow of that storm and stress was still illuminating the last romantic in 1874, the date of the novel's publication, though not of its gestation.

I am well aware that I love Hugo because of his sublime excessiveness, which I have celebrated elsewhere: Excess can transform even bad writing and banality into Wagnerian tempests. To explain the allure of a film like Casablanca, I have argued that while a single cliché produces kitsch; a hundred clichés, scattered around shamelessly, become epic. I once remarked that while the Count of Monte Cristo may be badly written (unlike other novels by Dumas, such as the Three Musketeers), redundant, and verbose, it is precisely because of these bad qualities, pushed beyond reasonable limits, that it borders on the sublime dynamic of Kantian memory and justifies its grip on the attention of millions of readers. Going back to Ninety-three, let us try to understand what is meant by excess. Before doing so, let me summarize the story that, at its heart, is elementary, sufficiently melodramatic, and, in the hands of an Italian librettist, could have produced the equivalent of, say, Tosca or Il Trovatore (but without the musical commentary that allows us to take the verses seriously).

It is the annus horribilis of the revolution. The Vendée has risen in revolt. An elderly aristocrat, a skilled warrior, the marquis of Lantenac, has come ashore to take command of the peasant masses, who are emerging from mysterious forests like demons, firing their weapons while saying the rosary. The revolution, which is expressed through the Convention, has sent its men against him. First comes Gauvain (Lantenac's nephew), a young aristocrat turned republican, of a feminine beauty, blazing with war yet also an angelic utopian who still hopes that the conflict can be settled through mercy and respect for one's enemy. Next is Cimourdain, whom we would call a police commissioner today: a priest as ruthless in his way as Lantenac, he is convinced that the only way to achieve social and political regeneration is through a bloodbath, and that today's pardoned hero is tomorrow's murderous enemy. Cimourdain, in yet another coincidence (melodrama has its demands), was once the tutor of the young Gauvain and loves him like a son. Hugo never conjures up a passion that is anything other than the total identification of a man-chaste because of his faith and later because of his revolutionary fervor-with spiritual fatherhood. But who knows? Cimourdain's passion is fierce, total, and carnally mystic.

In this struggle between revolution and reaction, Lantenac and Gavuain attempt to kill each other, clashing and fleeing in a spiral of nameless massacres. Yet this story of multiple horrors opens with a battalion of republican soldiers coming upon a starving widow and her three children. They decide to adopt the little ones on a radiant day in May. The children will later be captured by Lantenac, who shoots the mother and takes the little republican mascots hostage. The mother survives the execution and wanders about desperately looking for her children. The republicans fight to free the three innocent prisoners, who are locked in the gloomy medieval tower where Lantenac will later be attacked by Gauvain. Lantenac manages to escape through a secret passageway, but his followers set fire to the tower. With the children's lives hanging in the balance, the distraught mother reappears, and Lantenac (who undergoes a transfiguration from Satan into Lucifer, the guardian angel) reenters the tower, rescues the children, and brings them to safety, allowing himself to be captured by his enemies.

Cimourdain arranges for a trial right then and there, bringing in a guillotine for the occasion. In the meantime Gauvain wonders whether it is right to execute a man who has already paid for his errors through an act of generosity. He enters the prisoner's cell, where Lantenac reaffirms the rights of the throne and of the altar in a long monologue. In the end Gauvain allows him to escape and takes his place in the cell. When Cimourdain learns of this gesture, he has no choice but to put Gauvain on trial and cast the deciding vote for the death of the only person he has ever loved.

The recurrent motif of the three children accompanies the tormented adventures of Gauvain, who in the name of kindness and mercy submits to the punishment he has brought on himself. Both motifs cast a ray of hope on a future that can only be ushered in through human sacrifice. The entire army raises its voice, demanding grace for its commander, but to no avail. Although he is deeply moved, Cimourdain is a man who has dedicated his life to duty and law. He is the guardian of the revolutionary purity that has come to be identified with terror, or rather, with the Terror. Yet at the moment that Gauvain's head rolls into the basket, Cimourdain takes his own life with a pistol: "And those two souls, tragic sisters, took flight together, the shadow of the one blending with the light of the other."

* * *

Is that it? Hugo only wanted to make us weep? Not at all. My first observation has to be made in narratological rather than political terms. Today the repertory of every scholar of narrative structures (I promise to avoid erudite references to secondary theoretical variants) includes the idea that while there are indeed actors in a story, they are embodiments of "actants," narrative roles through which the actor goes, perhaps changing his function in the plot structure. For example, in a novel like The Betrothed, the forces of evil or human weakness can act against the forces of providence, which controls everyone's destinies, and an actor like the Unnamed One can suddenly change from being an Opponent to being a Helper. Hence, by comparison to actors tethered to an immutable actantial role, such as Don Rodrigo, on the one hand, and Fra Cristofero, on the other, the ambiguity of Don Abbondio makes sense: an earthenware crock in the midst of iron pots, he constantly drifts from one role to the other, ultimately making him seem worthy of our forgiveness.

By the time the elderly Hugo finally started to write the novel he had long contemplated (he had mentioned it some years earlier in the preface to the Man Who Laughs), his youthful political and ideological positions had undergone a profound change. As a young man he had expressed legitimist ideas and sympathized for the Vendée, seeing 1793 as a dark spot in the blue sky of 1789. He later shifted toward liberal and then socialist principles. After the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon, he gravitated toward socialist, democratic, and republican positions. In his 1841 admission speech to the French Academy, he paid homage to the Convention, "which broke the throne and saved the country ... which committed acts and outrages that we might detest and condemn, but which we must still admire." While he could not understand the Paris Commune, after the Restoration he fought for amnesty for the communards. The gestation and publication of Ninety-three coincide with his completed evolution toward more radical positions. To understand the Commune, he also had to justify the Terror. A long-standing opponent of the death penalty, he was mindful, nevertheless, of the reactionary lesson of an author he knew well, Joseph de Maistre: he knew that redemption and purification also come about through the horrors of human sacrifice.

Hugo's mentions de Maistre in book 1, chapter 4 of Les miserables, in the scene where Monsignor Myriel contemplates the guillotine:

He who sees it quakes with the most mysterious of tremblings.... The scaffold is a vision.... It seems a sort of being which had some sombre origin of which we can have no idea; one would say that this frame sees, that this machine understands, that this mechanism comprehends; that this wood, this iron, and these ropes have a will.... The scaffold becomes the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, and it drinks blood ... a spectre which seems to live with a kind of unspeakable life, drawn from all the death which it has wrought.

But in Ninety-three the guillotine, which will claim the life of the revolution's purest hero, passes from the side of death to the side of life. A symbol of the future in contrast to the gloomiest symbols of the past, it is erected in front of the Tourge, the stronghold where Lantenac is under siege. The tower condenses fifteen hundred years of feudal sins, a tough knot to untangle. Before it stands the guillotine, as pure as the blade that slices the knot. The guillotine was not born ex nihilo: it was fertilized by blood spilt for fifteen centuries on that same land. It arises from the depths of the earth, an unknown vindicator, and says to the tower, "I am your daughter." And the tower senses that the end is near. This was not a new analogy for Hugo. It recalls The Hunchback of Notre Dame, when Frollo compares the printed book to the cathedral's towers and gargoyles: "Ceci tuera cela." While the guillotine is always and still a monster, in Ninety-three it takes the side of the future.

What do you call a ferocious, death-sowing monster that promises a better life? An oxymoron. Victor Brombert has commented on the many oxymora that populate the novel: rapacious angel, intimate disagreement, colossal sweetness, odiously helpful, terrible peacefulness, venerable innocents, tremendous misery, hell in full daybreak, and Lantenac himself, who at one point shifts from being an infernal Satan to being a celestial Lucifer. The oxymoron is "a rhetorical microcosm that affirms the substantially antithetical nature of the world," although Brombert emphasizes that the antitheses are ultimately resolved into a higher order. Ninety-three relates the story of a virtuous crime, a healing act of violence whose deep purposes must be understood for its episodes to be justified. Ninety-three aims to be not the story of what some men did but rather the story of what history forced those men to do, independently of their will, which is often fraught with contradictions. And the idea of those purposes justifies even the force ostensibly opposed to such purposes, the Vendée.

This leads us back to the relationship between small actors and actants in the novel. Each individual and object, from Marat to the guillotine, represents not so much itself as the great forces that are the true protagonists of the work. Cocteau once claimed that "Victor Hugo was a madman who believed he was Victor Hugo." He was exaggerating. Victor Hugo merely believed that he was God, or at least God's official interpreter, and every story he told tries to justify itself from God's perspective.

On every page Novantatré repeats that the true actants appearing on the stage of his novel are the people, the revolution. Behind the scenes, implacable, is God.

Whatever Hugo's God may be, it is always present in his narrative to explain the blood-drenched enigmas of history. He might never have written that everything real is rational, but he would have agreed that everything ideal is rational. Hugo always adopts a Hegelian tone, recognizing that history marches toward its own purposes, above and beyond the heads of actors who are condemned to personify its intents. Take, for example, the symphonic description of the battle of Waterloo in Les miserables. Unlike Stendhal, who describes the battle through the eyes of Fabrizio, a youth in the thick of it unable to comprehend what is happening, Hugo describes the battle through the eyes of God, who sees it from above. He knows that if Napoleon had known that beyond the ridge of the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau there was a cliff (which his scout failed to mention), Milhaud's cuirassiers would not have been defeated by the English Army; that if the shepherd boy who had guided Bülow had suggested a different route, the Prussian Army would not have arrived in time to decide the fate of the battle. But who cares? Once Hugo has described Waterloo as a first-rate battle won by a second-rate captain, who cares about the miscalculations of Napoleon (actor), the ignorance of Grouchy (actor)-who could have returned but did not-or the tricks, if any, of the actor Wellington?

This madness, this terror, this falling to ruins of the highest bravery which ever astonished history, can that be without cause? No. The shadow of an enormous right hand rests on Waterloo. It is the day of Destiny. A power above man controlled that day.... This disappearance of the great man was necessary for the advent of the great century. One, to whom there is no reply, took it in charge. The panic of heroes is explained. In the battle of Waterloo, there is more than a cloud, there is a meteor. God passed over it. (296)

God also passes through the Vendée and the Convention, gradually taking on the actorial guise of fierce Bushman peasants or aristocrats converted to égalité, shadowy nocturnal heroes like Cimourdain or solar ones like Gauvain. At the rational level, Hugo saw the Vendée as a mistake, but since it was a deliberate mistake held in check by a providential (or fatal) plan, he was fascinated by it and made it into an epic. He is skeptical, sarcastic, and petty about the small men that populated the Convention, but as a group he saw them as giants. At the very least, he gives us a giant image of the Convention.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

On The Novel ix

2.1. THE LONG DURATION

The Novel in Search of Itself: A Historical Morphology by THOMAS PAVEL 3

Epic, Novel by MASSIMO FUSILLO 32

The Poetry of Mediocrity by SYLVIE THOREL-CAILLETEAU 64

The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism by FREDRIC JAMESON 95

Readings: Prototypes

Massimo Fusillo, Aethiopika (Heliodorus, Third or Fourth Century) 131
Abdelfattah Kilito, Maqamat (Hamadhan FD, Late Tenth Century) 138
Francisco Rico, Lazarillo de Tormes ("L zaro de Tormes," circa 1553) 146
Thomas DiPiero, Le Grand Cyrus (Madeleine de Scud ry, 1649-1653) 152
Perry Anderson, Persian Letters (Montesquieu, 1721) 161
Ian Duncan, Waverley (Walter Scott, 1814) 173
Paolo Tortonese, The Mysteries of Paris (Eug ne Sue, 1842-1843) 181
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, The War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells, 1898) 189
Ambrosio Fornet, The Kingdom of This World (Alejo Carpentier, 1949) 196

2.2. WRITING PROSE

Forms of the Supernatural in Narrative by FRANCESCO ORLANDO 207

The Prose of the World by MICHAL PELED GINSBURG AND LORRI G. NANDREA 244

Excess and History in Hugo's Ninety-three by UMBERTO ECO 274

Minor Characters by ALEX WOLOCH 295

324Toward a Database of Novelistic Topoi by NATHALIE FERRAND 324

2.3. THEMES, FIGURES

The Fiction of Bourgeois Morality and the Paradox of Individualism by NANCY ARMSTRONG 349

The Death of Lucien de Rubempr by A. S. BYATT 389

A Portrait of the Artist as a Social Climber: Upward Mobility in the Novel by BRUCE ROBBINS 409

A Businessman in Love by FREDRIC JAMESON 436

Readings: Narrating Politics

Benedict Anderson, Max Havelaar (Multatuli, 1860) 449
Luisa Villa, The Tiger of Malaysia (Emilio Salgari, 1883-1884) 463
Edoarda Masi, Ah Q (Lu Hs n, 1921-1922) 469
Thomas Lahusen, Cement (Fedor Gladkov, 1925) 476
Piergiorgio Bellocchio, A Private Matter (Beppe Fenoglio, 1963) 483
Simon Gikandi, Arrow of God (Chinua Achebe, 1964) 489
Jos Miguel Oviedo, Conversation in the Cathedral (Mario Vargas Llosa, 1969) 497
Klaus R. Scherpe, The Aesthetics of Resistance (Peter Weiss, 1975-1981) 503

Readings: The Sacrifice of the Heroine

April Alliston, Aloisa and Melliora (Love in Excess, Eliza Haywood, 1719-1720) 515
Juliet Mitchell, Natasha and H l ne (War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, 1863-1869) 534
Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, Nana (Nana, mile Zola, 1880) 541
Valentine Cunningham, Tess (Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy, 1891) 548
Peter Madsen, Elsie (The Dangerous Age, Karin Micha lis, 1910) 559

2.4. S PACE AND STORY

Over-writing as Un-writing: Descriptions, World-Making, and Novelistic Time by MIEKE BAL 571

The Roads of the Novel by HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT 611

The Chronotopes of the Sea by MARGARET COHEN 647

667Torn Space: James Joyce's Ulysses by PHILIP FISHER 667

Readings: The New Metropolis

Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai (Midnight, Mao Dun, 1932) 687
Ernesto Franco, Buenos Aires (Ad n Buenosayres, Leopoldo Marechal, 1948) 693
Ernest Emenyonu, Lagos (People of the City, Cyprian Ekwensi, 1954) 700
Roger Allen, Cairo (The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz, 1956-1957) 706
Ardis L. Nelson, Havana (Three Trapped Tigers, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 1967) 714
Homi Bhabha, Bombay (Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie, 1981) 721
Sibel Irzik, Istanbul (The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk, 1990) 728

2.5. UNCERTAIN BOUNDARIES

Form and Chance: The German Novella by ANDREAS GAILUS 739

Inconceivable History: Storytelling as Hyperphasia and Disavowal by FRANCIS MULHERN 777

Innovation: Notes on Nihilism and the Aesthetics of the Novel by JOHN BRENKMAN 808

Narrative Literature in the Turing Universe by ESPEN AARSETH 839

Readings: A Century of Experiments

871Andreina Lavagetto, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910) 871
Myra Jehlen, The Making of Americans (Gertrude Stein, 1925) 880
Ann Banfield, Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925) 888
Jos Luiz Passos, Macuna ma (M rio de Andrade, 1928) 896
Seamus Deane, Finnegans Wake ( James Joyce, 1939) 906
Declan Kiberd, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (Samuel Beckett, 1951-1953) 912
Beatriz Sarlo, Hopscotch ( Julio Cort zar, 1963) 919
Ursula K. Heise, Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon, 1973) 926

Contributors 933

Author Index 937

Works Cited Index 944

Editorial Reviews

"This two-volume set is the most important resource on the novel now available. Like the novel itself, this work spans the globe and the centuries. . . . Essential."

Choice

Moretti's ability in his own criticism to use a playful, informal style is quite remarkable; he quickly puts readers at ease as he calls into question a great deal of what they think they know about narrative. . . . In short, both the range and the content of these essays are exceptionally lively and dynamic, and the writing is sophisticated.
— Brian Evenson

Novel: A Forum on Fiction

There is very much worth exploring in Moretti's excellent collection of essays. . . . Moretti's fine collection is a robust testimony to the novel's long, complex, multicultural history.

International Journal of the Classical Tradition - Steven D. Smith

Moretti's ability in his own criticism to use a playful, informal style is quite remarkable; he quickly puts readers at ease as he calls into question a great deal of what they think they know about narrative. . . . In short, both the range and the content of these essays are exceptionally lively and dynamic, and the writing is sophisticated.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction - Brian Evenson

Hugely ambitious. . . . Explores fiction with a capaciousness that's exhilarating as well as eye-opening, as a galactic crew of critics swoop in on subjects ranging from ancient China to Toni Morrison.

The New Statesman - Marina Warner

No reader will come away from these volumes without a long list of novels they now want to read—novels, in many cases, well-known within their own linguistic or national tradition but unfamiliar outside of it. . . . [This is] a project so capacious, so audacious, so polyvocal—in a word, so novel.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction - Leah Price

When you open The Novel . . . you may think you know what a novel is; by the time you close it . . . you are no longer sure. . . . The sheer diversity of topics here is exciting and opens up many new horizons. . . . It is impossible to understand why the novel has been the quintessential modern art form, and why it has appealed to writers and readers around the globe, without understanding the circumstances of its rise in Western Europe in the 18th century. . . . [I]t helped to incarnate the modern sensibility, and to teach its readers what it means to be modern. . . . If the novel is indeed losing its central position in our imaginative life . . . it can only be because modernity itself is slipping away, with all it distinctive promise and menace.

New York Sun - Adam Kirsch

Praise for Italian edition: [These] interesting, useful books . . . are not humble, simply informative manuals: they offer essays that lead in multiple directions and examine fundamental problems and questions. They assess the breadth of current studies and they establish an analytical horizon for advanced contemporary culture.

L'Unita - Giulio Ferrot

Praise for Italian edition: There are books that you read and reread, others that you consult when useful or just for the pleasure . . . . [The Novel] belongs to both categories because it is much more than a mere collection of essays on a specific subject (in this case, the novel as literary genre, reinterpreted through contributions by novelists, critics, philosophers, anthropologists, and historians from every part of the world). Its changing, evocative flavors are so mouthwatering that it is like a platter of tapas, the little appetizers served by Catalans before a meal, which often take the place of an entire meal. The topic is books—a continuous game of citations and reflections. From the outset, it gives the reader symptoms of an ancient hunger. We are not sure what pushes us to read it and we try to grab and hold on to as much of it as possible . . . . [The Novel] is not a book. It is a Pantagruelian feast that awakens limitless appetites. It helps to remind us how many flavors can be found in literature and—above all—how many we have lost by eating fast food for the brain.

Il Mattino - Diego De Silva

Praise for Italian edition: These volumes are a heroic attempt to capture the great animal of words that we call The Novel. The hunting strategy employed by Franco Moretti and his contributors proves complex and articulated but at the same time oblique and diversified. A merely systematic work could never handle this subject. Neither could a totally anarchic approach . . . . This work is destined to occupy an important place in contemporary reflections on the novel and on narrative forms in general. The essays are agile but not superficial, specialized but readable, and current . . . . More than anything else, [The Novel] arouses one's desire to read and reread literary works.

La Stampa - Dario Voltolini

[A] very ambitious collection . . . . The Novel is an impressive achievement, and precisely because Moretti was so willing to include perspectives that diverge sharply from his own.

Nation - William Deresiewicz

It's a rare literary critic who attracts so much public attention, and there's good reason: few are as hell-bent on rethinking the way we talk about literature. . . . There's no question that people will still be talking about these volumes twenty-five years from now.

Times Literary Supplement - Eric Bulson

The most crucial aspect of the Il romanzo project is the idea driving it to see literature globally, to free 'the novel' from its modernist, strictly Western center of emergence and consider instead how the form has mutated around the world, and why.

BookForum - Emilie Bickerton

There is very much worth exploring in Moretti's excellent collection of essays. . . . Moretti's fine collection is a robust testimony to the novel's long, complex, multicultural history.
— Steven D. Smith

International Journal of the Classical Tradition

Hugely ambitious. . . . Explores fiction with a capaciousness that's exhilarating as well as eye-opening, as a galactic crew of critics swoop in on subjects ranging from ancient China to Toni Morrison.
— Marina Warner

The New Statesman

When you open The Novel . . . you may think you know what a novel is; by the time you close it . . . you are no longer sure. . . . The sheer diversity of topics here is exciting and opens up many new horizons. . . . It is impossible to understand why the novel has been the quintessential modern art form, and why it has appealed to writers and readers around the globe, without understanding the circumstances of its rise in Western Europe in the 18th century. . . . [I]t helped to incarnate the modern sensibility, and to teach its readers what it means to be modern. . . . If the novel is indeed losing its central position in our imaginative life . . . it can only be because modernity itself is slipping away, with all it distinctive promise and menace.
— Adam Kirsch

New York Sun

[A] very ambitious collection . . . . The Novel is an impressive achievement, and precisely because Moretti was so willing to include perspectives that diverge sharply from his own.
— William Deresiewicz

Nation

It's a rare literary critic who attracts so much public attention, and there's good reason: few are as hell-bent on rethinking the way we talk about literature. . . . There's no question that people will still be talking about these volumes twenty-five years from now.
— Eric Bulson

Times Literary Supplement

The most crucial aspect of the Il romanzo project is the idea driving it to see literature globally, to free 'the novel' from its modernist, strictly Western center of emergence and consider instead how the form has mutated around the world, and why.
— Emilie Bickerton

BookForum

Praise for Italian edition: [These] interesting, useful books . . . are not humble, simply informative manuals: they offer essays that lead in multiple directions and examine fundamental problems and questions. They assess the breadth of current studies and they establish an analytical horizon for advanced contemporary culture.
— Giulio Ferrot

L'Unita

Praise for Italian edition: There are books that you read and reread, others that you consult when useful or just for the pleasure . . . . [The Novel] belongs to both categories because it is much more than a mere collection of essays on a specific subject (in this case, the novel as literary genre, reinterpreted through contributions by novelists, critics, philosophers, anthropologists, and historians from every part of the world). Its changing, evocative flavors are so mouthwatering that it is like a platter of tapas, the little appetizers served by Catalans before a meal, which often take the place of an entire meal. The topic is books—a continuous game of citations and reflections. From the outset, it gives the reader symptoms of an ancient hunger. We are not sure what pushes us to read it and we try to grab and hold on to as much of it as possible . . . . [The Novel] is not a book. It is a Pantagruelian feast that awakens limitless appetites. It helps to remind us how many flavors can be found in literature and—above all—how many we have lost by eating fast food for the brain.
— Diego De Silva

Il Mattino

Praise for Italian edition: These volumes are a heroic attempt to capture the great animal of words that we call The Novel. The hunting strategy employed by Franco Moretti and his contributors proves complex and articulated but at the same time oblique and diversified. A merely systematic work could never handle this subject. Neither could a totally anarchic approach . . . . This work is destined to occupy an important place in contemporary reflections on the novel and on narrative forms in general. The essays are agile but not superficial, specialized but readable, and current . . . . More than anything else, [The Novel] arouses one's desire to read and reread literary works.
— Dario Voltolini

La Stampa

The most crucial aspect of the Il romanzo project is the idea driving it to see literature globally, to free 'the novel' from its modernist, strictly Western center of emergence and consider instead how the form has mutated around the world, and why.
— Emilie Bickerton

Bookforum

When you open The Novel . . . you may think you know what a novel is; by the time you close it . . . you are no longer sure. . . . The sheer diversity of topics here is exciting and opens up many new horizons. . . . It is impossible to understand why the novel has been the quintessential modern art form, and why it has appealed to writers and readers around the globe, without understanding the circumstances of its rise in Western Europe in the 18th century. . . . [I]t helped to incarnate the modern sensibility, and to teach its readers what it means to be modern. . . . If the novel is indeed losing its central position in our imaginative life . . . it can only be because modernity itself is slipping away, with all it distinctive promise and menace.
— Adam Kirsch

The New York Sun

Over the last 30 years, our understanding of the origins and nature of the novel has dramatically expanded. The more than 100 essays collected in these two volumes edited by Moretti (English & comparative literature, Stanford Univ.; Signs Taken for Wonders) survey the current thinking. They are selected and translated from the five-volume Il romanzo, originally published in Italy between 2001 and 2003. Included are articles by a number of familiar names among contemporary authorities, including A.S. Byatt, Thomas Pavel, Andrew Plaks, and Frederic Jameson. The first volume focuses on rethinking the origins and history of the novel and its range across national and linguistic boundaries. The second focuses more on matters of form and type. The articles in each volume are divided between general statements and critical assessments of individual works. Each has its own footnotes as appropriate; there is no collective bibliography. An essential resource for all academic collections serving students of language and literature.-Thomas L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, GA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Honorable Mention for the 2007 John G. Cawelti Award, American Culture Association

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2007

From the Publisher

"There is a great deal to relish here...Moretti and his contributors have succeeded in making the study of the novel—if not the entire 'literary field'—'longer, larger and deeper' that it was before, or than any single scholar could ever make it."

London Review Bookshop