Experimental Criticism offers a series of close critical engagements with one of the world’s most innovative literary thinkers. Franco Moretti, author of such major works as Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World, Modern Epic, Atlas of the European Novel and The Bourgeois, may be best known for his ‘distant reading’ of vast numbers of literary texts at the Stanford Literary Lab. Francesco de Cristofaro and Stefano Ercolino lead a...

Nearly as global in its ambition and sweep as its subject, Franco Moretti's The Novel is a watershed event in the understanding of the first truly planetary literary form. A translated selection from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo (2001-2003), *The Novel'*s two volumes are a unified multiauthored reference work, containing more than one hundred specially commissioned essays by leading contemporary critics from around the world. Providing the first international c...

Nearly as global in its ambition and sweep as its subject, Franco Moretti's The Novel is a watershed event in the understanding of the first truly planetary literary form. A translated selection from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo (2001-2003), *The Novel'*s two volumes are a unified multiauthored reference work, containing more than one hundred specially commissioned essays by leading contemporary critics from around the world. Providing the first international c...

In this collection of essays, leading cultural theorists consider the meaning and implications of world-scale humanist scholarship by engaging with Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis. The renowned sociologist developed his influential critical framework to explain the historical and continuing exploitation of the rest of the world by the West. World-systems analysis reflects Wallerstein’s conviction that understanding global inequality requires thinking on a global scale. Humani...

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDHow 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 posit...

The influential and controversial critic takes literary history out of the classroom and into the publicIn the field of literary history and theory, Franco Moretti is synonymous with innovation. The cofounder of the Stanford Literary Lab, he brought quantitative methods into the study of the novel, enabling a "distant" reading that uses computation to analyze literary production over centuries. But at the same time, he was also teaching undergraduates the history of...

"I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals," wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today?Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature, where a gallery of individual portraits is entwined around the analysis of specific keywords – such as ‘useful’ and ‘earnest’, ‘efficiency’, ‘influence’, ‘comfort’, ‘roba’ – and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose....

A lost literary classic, written in 1894, The Viceroys is one of the most acclaimed masterworks of Italian realism. The novel follows three generations of the aristocratic Uzeda family as it struggles to hold on to power in the face of the cataclysmic changes rocking Sicily. As Garibaldi’s triumphs move Italy toward unification, the Uzedas try every means to retain their position. De Roberto’s satirical and mordant pen depicts a cast of upper-class schemers, headed by the old matr...

In this lively and provocative book, cultural critic Marjorie Garber, who has written on topics as different as Shakespeare, dogs, cross-dressing, and real estate, explores the pleasures and pitfalls of the academic life. Academic Instincts discusses three of the perennial issues that have surfaced in recent debates about the humanities: the relation between "amateurs" and "professionals," the relation between one academic discipline and another, and the relation between "jargon" ...

The book investigates the dispersed emergence of the new visual regime associated with nineteenth-century pre-cinematic spectacles in the literary imagination of the previous centuries. Its comparative angle ranges from the Medieval and Baroque period to the visual and stylistic experimentations of the Romantic age, in the prose of Anne Radcliffe, the experiments of Friedrich Schlegel, and in Wordsworth’s Prelude. The book examines the cultural traces of the transformation of perc...

A comprehensive, critical and accessible account of Theodor W. Adorno's materialist-dialectical aesthetic theory of art from a contemporary perspective, this volume shows how Adorno's critical theory is awash with images crystallising thoughts to such a degree that it has every reason to be described as aesthetic.

Far from creating a borderless world, contemporary globalization has generated a proliferation of borders. In Border as Method, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson chart this proliferation, investigating its implications for migratory movements, capitalist transformations, and political life. They explore the atmospheric violence that surrounds borderlands and border struggles across various geographical scales, illustrating their theoretical arguments with illuminating case studies...