Franco Moretti: Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models For A Literary History (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · geography, history of literature, literary criticism, literary theory, literature, reading
The “great iconoclast of literary criticism” reinvents the study of the novel.
In this groundbreaking book, Franco Moretti argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. In place of the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, Moretti offers charts, maps and time lines, developing the idea of “distant reading” into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, in which the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres—the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel—as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.
Afterword by Alberto Piazza
Publisher Verso, 2005
ISBN 1844670260, 9781844670260
119 pages
a series of short essays and comments on the book (The Valve)
review (Elif Batuman, n+1)
review (Kathryn Schulz, The New York Times Sunday Book Review)
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