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The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, by Franco Moretti; pp. 203. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013, $26.95.
What do you love most about the irrepressible, endlessly inventive Franco Moretti? Take your pick: you can marvel at the delicate, subtle work of The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987) in which the "episodic" is that which interrupts the flow of important events inside the European nineteenth-century realist novel-and also, mirabile dictu, the actual substance out of which those events are constituted (The Way of the World, trans. Albert Sbragia [Verso, 2000], 42-48). Or you can focus instead on the distant reading project that produced brilliant articles about the rise and fall of micro-genres, the advent of the clue as a crucial component of the detective story, and the quantifiability of literary style (for the last, see the ongoing "Literary Lab" pamphlets). I imagine that few readers of Victorian Studies lack strong views about Moretti's various and brilliant provocations and interventions.
There are many who have taken up cudgels against and in favor of Moretti's turn toward big data in recent years (see, for example, reviews of his other recent book, Distant Reading [2013]). The Bourgeois, however, despite a few small forays into the datametric, continues the project Moretti began in The Way of the World: an exploration of the relationship between the form of bourgeois realist novels (and other artworks, but mostly novels) and the structure of society in which those works were created. To do so, Moretti proposes a new word (new to me, anyhow) for the domain that he has explored with his taxonomist's genius: the "literary morphospace" (14).
The term perfectly suits what I have long admired about Moretti's work: his openness to the various iterations that a particular idea, motif, or even experimental style might take over the course of decades or centuries. Moretti knows where to lump and where to split such "morphs," and my understanding of the vagaries of realist fiction has been incredibly enriched by his capacity to capture the features that unite various experiments in free indirect discourse, as well as by his various geographical and cartographic...