Between History and Literature
FRANCO MORETTI
to Perry Anderson and Paolo Flores d’Arcais
Contents
Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions
1. ‘I am a member of the bourgeois class’
4. Between history and literature
6. Prose and keywords: preliminary remarks
7. ‘The bourgeois is lost . . .’
1. Adventure, enterprise, Fortuna
2. ‘This will testify for me that I was not idle’
6. Prose I: ‘The rhythm of continuity’
7. Prose II: ‘We have discovered the productivity of the spirit . . .’
2. Fillers
3. Rationalization
4. Prose III: Reality principle
5. Description, conservatism, Realpolitik
6. Prose IV: ‘A transposition of the objective into the subjective’
1. Naked, shameless, and direct
2. ‘Behind the veil’
3. The Gothic, un déjà-là
4. The gentleman
5. Keywords V: ‘Influence’
6. Prose V: Victorian adjectives
7. Keywords VI: ‘Earnest’
8. ‘Who loves not Knowledge?’
9. Prose VI: Fog
IV. ‘National Malformations’: Metamorphoses in the Semi-Periphery
2. Keywords VII: ‘Roba’
3. Persistence of the Old Regime I: The Doll
4. Persistence of the Old Regime II: Torquemada
5. ‘There’s arithmetic for you!’
V. Ibsen and the Spirit of Capitalism
2. ‘Signs against signs’
3. Bourgeois prose, capitalist poetry
Copyright
A few words on some sources used frequently in the book. The Google Books corpus is a collection of several million books that allows very simple searches. The Chadwyck-Healey database of nineteenth-century fiction collects 250 extremely well-curated British and Irish novels ranging from 1782 to 1903. The Literary Lab corpus includes about 3,500 nineteenth-century British, Irish and American novels.
I also often refer to dictionaries, indicating them in parenthesis, without further specifications: the OED is the Oxford English Dictionary, Robert and Littré are French, Grimm is German, and Battaglia Italian.
Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions
1. ‘I AM A MEMBER OF THE BOURGEOIS CLASS’
The bourgeois . . . Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. ‘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 1895.1 Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois ‘opinions and ideals’—what are they?
The changed atmosphere is reflected in scholarly work. Simmel and Weber, Sombart and Schumpeter, all saw capitalism and the bourgeois—economy and anthropology—as two sides of the same coin. ‘I know of no serious historical interpretation of this modern world of ours’, wrote Immanuel Wallerstein a quarter-century ago, ‘in which the concept of the bourgeoisie . . . is absent. And for good reason. It is hard to tell a story without its main protagonist.’2 And yet, today, even those historians who most emphasize the role of ‘opinions and ideals’ in the take-off of capitalism—Meiksins Wood, de Vries, Appleby, Mokyr—have little or no interest in the figure of the bourgeois. ‘In England there was