Shakespearean tragedy and "Dracula," Sherlock Holmes and "Ulysses," "Frankenstei "and "The Waste Land"--all are celebrated "wonders" of modern literature, whether in its mandarin or popular form. However, it is the fact that these texts are so central to our contemporary notion of literature that so[...]

"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, [...]

The 'great iconoclast of literary criticism' ("Guardian") reinvents the study of the novel. Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. He insists that such a move could bring new lustre to a tired field[...]

In a series of one hundred maps, Franco Moretti explores the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel. Balzac's Paris, Dickens's London and Scott's Scottish Lowlands are mapped, alongside the territories of Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels [...]