Franco Moretti

Writer Lucas Yoder, editor Shirley Marmelstein, critic and would-be author Karl Streibert, and reader Jane Garland, who treasures the written word, play key roles in a study of the people who create, publish, critique, and enjoy books.

When a young Englishwoman named Jennifer Morton leaves London to visit relatives on their sheep ranch in the Australian outback, she falls in love both with the gloriously beautiful country and with Carl, a Czech refugee who was a doctor in his own land and now works as a lumberjack. They are brought together through dramatic encounters and strange twists of fate, but their relationship hangs in the balance when Jennifer is called back to England.

“Atlante del romanzo europeo, 1800-1900” di Franco Moretti è un’opera che esplora lo sviluppo del romanzo europeo durante il XIX secolo attraverso un approccio innovativo e interdisciplinare. Moretti utilizza strumenti e metodi provenienti dalla geografia, dalla statistica e dalla teoria dei sistemi per analizzare il panorama letterario dell’epoca, offrendo una nuova prospettiva sulla letteratura. Il libro si struttura come un atlante, con mappe, grafici e diagrammi che illustrano la diffusione, la trasformazione e l’interazione dei romanzi nel continente europeo. Attraverso questo lavoro, Moretti invita i lettori a vedere la letteratura non solo come un insieme di opere individuali, ma come un sistema dinamico che riflette e contribuisce ai cambiamenti sociali e culturali del suo tempo.

How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions. From the evolutionary model of “Modern European Literature,” through the geo-cultural insights of “Conjectures of World Literature” and “Planet Hollywood,” to the quantitative findings of “Style, inc.” and the abstract patterns of “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” the book follows two decades of conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of “distant reading,” that has come to define{u2014}well beyond the wildest expectations of its author{u2014}a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.

Moretti explores the fascinating connections between literature and space, illuminating the geographical assumptions of 19th century novels and the geographical reach of particular authors and genres across the continent.

How did we get here? David Fromkin provides arresting and dramatic answers to the questions we ask ourselves as we approach the new millennium. He maps and illuminates the paths by which humanity came to its current state, giving coherence and meaning to the main turning points along the way by relating them to a vision of things to come. His unconventional approach to narrating universal history is to focus on the relevant past and to single out the eight critical evolutions that brought the world from the Big Bang to the eve of the twenty-first century. He describes how human beings survived by adapting to a world they had not yet begun to make their own, and how they created and developed organized society, religion, and warfare. He emphasizes the transformative forces of art and the written word, and the explosive effects of scientific discoveries. He traces the course of commerce, exploration, the growth of law, and the quest for freedom, and details how their convergence led to the world of today. - Jacket flap.