Moretti (1998) - Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900
From Inventiopedia
Moretti, Franco (1998): Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. London and New York: Verso.
This book proposes the field "Geography of literature" as a subdiscipline of literary sociology. It is divided into three main chapters:
1. "The novel, the nation-state" - analyzing how the geographical settings of 19th-century novels reflect the worldview of Europeans at the time of the development of the nation-states
2. "A tale of two cities" - Dicken's London and Balzac's Paris. analyzing how the novels make the cities "legible", and reflect the socio-geographic power structures in the cities.
3. "Narrative markets, ca. 1850" - which analyzes distribution of English and French 19th-century novels to the rest of Europe as a power struggle between the continent's two "narrative superpowers".
A highly interesting book, in particular for its repeated attempts to show how the geographical analysis also can be used to study the morphology.
...what do literary maps allow us to see? Thow things, basically. First they highlight the ortgebunden, place-bound nature of literary forms: each of them with its peculiar geometry, its boundaries, its spatial taboos and favorite routes. And then, maps bring to light the internal logic of narrative: the semiotic domain around which a plot coalesces and self-organizes. Literary form appears thus as the result of two conflicting, and equally significant forces: one working from the outside, and one from the inside. It is the usual, and at bottom the only real issue of literary history: society, rhetoric, and their interaction. (p. 5)
But if comic and tragic elements tend to show up near the border, this means that in Scott, or Pushkin, stylistic choices are determined by a specific geographical position. [...] Although the novel usually has a very low 'figurality' [...], near the border figurality rises: space and tropes are entwined; rhetoric is dependent upon space. [...] In an unknown space, we need an immediate 'semantic sketch' of our surroundings (Ricœur again), and only metaphors know how to do it. Only metaphors, I mean, can simultaneously express the unknown we must face, and yet also contain it. [...] since metaphors use a 'familiar field of reference', they also give form to the unknown: they contain it, and keep it somehow under control. (43-47)
--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 21:51, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
