The Bourgeois: Between History And Literature, Franco Moretti

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature

Franco Moretti

c. 2013

Franco Moretti: teaches Literature at Stanford; at Stanford, he is the Director of the Literary Lab. Several books, and chief editor of The Novel.

Chapter 1: much of the chapter is devoted to Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Daniel Defoe.

The concept of aventiure trade and adventure.  

The Protestant Ethic.

Rousseau and Goethe, the latter, Wanderjahre.

Heart of Darkness.

Chapter 2

Johannes Vermeer; paintings, letters

Pride and Prejudice

The painter Caillebotte and his Place de l'Europe

Goethe, again, this time, Wilhelm Meister's Years of Apprenticeship (1796).

Waverly (1814), Scott.

Middlemarch.

Fillers: the only narrative invention of the entire 18th century. Huge transition. Before 1800, few fillers. A hundred years later they are everywhere (the Goncourts, Zola, Fontane, Maupassant, Gissing, James, Proust ...)

Chapter 3

Communist Manifesto

Paintings, again:

Manet's Olympia: the masterpiece of the bourgeois century

By contrast, Ingres' Venus Anadyomene.

Millais' The Knight Errant.

Charlotte Brontë.

Back to Robinson Crusoe.

Chapter 4

Chapter 5: Ibsen