The Novel: Forms and Themes: 2 - Softcover

Franco Moretti

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691134731 ISBN 13: 9780691134734

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Product Description

Unusual book

Review

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

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2007"

"[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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0691134731
• ISBN 13: 9780691134734
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 960
• Editor: Franco Moretti