The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, New Edition [Paperback]

Franco Moretti (Author), Albert Sbragia (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 2000

Willhelm Meister, Elizabeth Bennet, Julian Sorel, Rastignac, Jane Eyre, Bazaroz, Dorothea Brooke...the Golden Age of the European novel discovers a new collective protagonist: youth. It is problematic and restless youth - 'strange' characters, as their own creators often say - arising from the downfall of traditional societies. But even more than that, youth is the symbolic figure for European modernity: that sudden mix of great expectations and lost illusions that the bourgeois world learns to 'read', and to accept, as if it were a novel. The Way of the World, with its unique combination of narrative theory and social history, interprets the Bildungsroman as the great cultural mediator of nineteenth-century Europe: a form which explores the many strange compromises between revolution and restoration, economic take-off and aesthetic pleasure, individual autonomy and social normality. This new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the Bildungsroman in the years around the First World War (a crisis which opened the way for Modernist experimentation), and a rew preface in which the Moretti looks back at The Way of the World in light of his more recent work.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A sheer intelligence animates the pages of Mr. Moretti's work. -- Edward Said, The New York Times Book Review

At the beginning of his analysis of the nineteenth century European novel, Franco Moretti asks a rhetorical question: how old was Hamlet? . . .Hamlet is thirty years old: far from young by Renaissance standards. But our culture, in choosing Hamlet as its first symbolic hero, has "forgotten" his age, or rather has had to alter it, and pictures the Prince of Denmark as a young man. -- The Independent

This is a rich and stimulating book, bold in its theoretical formulations and extremely suggestive in its analysis of specific texts. -- Comparative Literature Studies

About the Author

Franco Moretti teaches English at Stanford, where he directs the Centre for the Study of the Novel. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, Modern Epic, and Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900, all from Verso.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Verso (September 23, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859842984
• ISBN-13: 978-1859842980
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #415,582 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Re-Bildung the European Bildungsroman, September 29, 2002

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Volkswagen Blues "cead1" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, New Edition (Paperback)

Franco Moretti is one of those rare critics who consistently churns out books that--though never unassailably argued or immaculately interpretive--nevertheless change forever the way you read a genre. In "The Way of the World," Moretti sets his sights on the European Bildungsroman.

Moretti's basic argument is that the Bildungsroman genre served, in its various national incarnations, both to reveal and modify the processes of socialization--of putting each member of society into his or her proper place within the society--specific to each culture represented. He begins with an innovative reading of Napoleon at Waterloo and its innumerable literary reproductions throughout the 19th century, arguing that societies embroiled in Napoleonic Republicanism developed radically different styles of envisioning the individual's position vis-à-vis society than were evident in the societies Napoleon didn't reach (namely England, whose Bildungsroman Moretti finds unpalatably reactionary, "far more elementary and limited than its continental counterparts"). This framework enables closer readings of Stendhal, Goethe, Brontë, Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, Austen, Pushkin, etc.

Implicit in Moretti's thesis is a valorization of all things Napoleonic that gives slightly favorable treatment to those works whose individualism pits the protagonist against a repressive society (Stendhal's Sorel is a fave here), as against the less progressive tendencies of, say, Dickens, whose heroes are constantly checked--and who constantly ALLOW themselves to be checked--in their efforts to reach beyond the lot afforded them by a rigidly hierarchized industrial society (David Copperfield, Pip, etc.).

"The Way of the World" combines an amazing attention to detail with an equally amazing occasional lack of it. Moretti's readings of Stendhal are at times revelatory, but finally incomplete, as he fails to account for punishments meted out by the text. Is Stendhal really more progressive than Dickens simply because Stendhal's heroes end up dead and Dickens' end up employed? This may make the heroes more progressive in Stendhal, but the text seems to perform its own brutal socialization, checking the protagonists even more definitively than Dickens ever does. Likewise, the lack of treatment of Thackeray, a huge figure who could have single-handedly troubled Moretti's pronouncements on the supposedly conservative English version of the genre, is palpable.

The fact is, though, this is an illuminating book. You won't be able to read anything written in the 19th century the same way afterwards. Moretti reveals novels for what they are--vicarious testing grounds for various ways of being in the world--and goes a long way toward making us more attentive to what subtle social messages they convey and what those messages can do to us.