Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)

Moretti, Franco

doi:10.1086/606125

Cited by 63 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…Novels are products of capitalism in a straightforward economic sense: they quickly became commodities produced for mass consumption (Moretti, 2009), and their initial success as a form depended upon the emergence of a literate, semi-leisured urban class (Watt, 1957). Novels are also responsive to, and constrained by, problems unique to capitalist societies, a matter that has been explored thoroughly by Lukacs and subsequent theorists.…”

Section: The Bourgeois Novel and The Duelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Duels in the European Novel: Honor, Reputation, and the Limits of a Bourgeois Form

Merriman¹

2017

Preprint

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Abstract. The emergence of market society in Europe prompted a major change in the social measurement of individual worth. The formal system of aristocratic honor culture was gradually supplanted by a bourgeois concept of reputation rooted in the public perception of individual merits. During this period, dueling was a practice of dispute resolution commonly used in honor groups, and also diffused to bourgeois groups in domains such as politics and journalism. This article explores this cultural transformation by examining duels in 20 European novels and comparing these duels with theoretical and historical work on duels as a social practice. The novels present a significantly distorted representation of dueling. This distortion demonstrates the limited ability of the novel, a bourgeois form, to describe group-oriented values such as honor. This is, in turn, sociologically significant: the novels point to major differences in the social psychologies underpinning honor and reputation, and also anticipate the obsolescence of honor culture well before this occurred historically.Keywords class, duels, honor, novels, violence, literature, sociology of literature, fiction, bourgeois, aristocracy This is an author postprint. The final, published version is available online at http://dx

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Section: The Bourgeois Novel and The Duelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Duels in the European Novel: Honor, Reputation, and the Limits of a Bourgeois Form

Merriman¹

2017

Preprint

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“…In his 2009 essay "Style, Inc.," Franco Moretti asks, "How can a couple of words stand in for hundreds of pages?" 3 To formulate an answer, he analyzes 282…”

Section: -Francis L Coleman the Northernmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…4 "Half sign, half ad," Moretti writes, "the title is where the novel as language meets the novel as commodity." 5 When Moretti proposes to look at titles, he does so in order to solve a problem of unreadability: one cannot possibly meaningfully read the seven thousand British novels that he believes warrant our consideration when studying the history of the novel. 6 This is a problem of scale: unable to read the texts, we opt to read and analyze something shorter instead.…”

Section: Ways Of Not Reading Gertrude Steinmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein

Cecire¹

2015

elh

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I situate the controversial critical strategies of distant reading and surface reading in the reception history of Gertrude Stein, an author whose work was frequently declared “unreadable.” I argue that an early twentieth-century history of compromised forms of reading, including women’s reading and information work, subtends both the technology with which distant reading may be carried out and the ways in which an author’s work comes to be understood as a corpus in the first place.

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“…B. Burrows 1987;Hoover 2003). Moretti (2009) legt beispielsweise in seiner Analyse der Titel britischer Romane von 1740-1850 das Hauptgewicht auf Umfang und Verwendungshäufigkeit von bestimmten und unbestimmten Artikeln.…”

Section: Quantitative Vergleiche In Korporaunclassified

Vergleich als Methode? Zur Empirisierung eines philologischen Verfahrens im Zeitalter der Digital Humanities

Klimek¹,

Müller²

2015

Journal of Literary Theory

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Literary scholars draw comparisons more often than they reflect on the practice of that drawing. Our study of comparisons in hermeneutic practice shows that comparative study is not merely a characteristic of general and comparative literary studies. It can also be found as a (generally qualitative) practice within the monolingual disciplines. The comparison of texts with similar themes is particularly widespread and popular, typically discovering through this comparison the differences and similarities of the literary treatment, in order to prove the aesthetic worth of a work and thus to make increased aesthetic pleasure possible. In addition, there are also studies which, through comparison of sample texts test the validity of statements about literary history or the typology of genres. The practice is particularly associated with comparative literary studies, which claims thus to overcome the limitations of monolingual literary studies. In principle, this form of test study can be extended to an unlimited number of cases, whereby philologists can, among other things, demonstrate how well-read they are. Nevertheless, this form of comparison, too, has to date mostly been used qualitatively, without exploring the potential of a quantitative expansion of the study.Making reference to Descartes' thesis (1628) that every growth in knowledge is always grounded in a comparison, it is discussed under what circumstances individual case studies may be understood as technically comparative in nature. In this regard one should be careful not to rob the concept of the comparison of the element of differentiation. Therefore, in what follows, we only class studies as comparative when they consider at least two cases (e. g. at least two works), although the main interest of the study may be reserved for one case.Further, in literary studies, comparisons may be used both to discover the characteristics of the object investigated (›discovery function‹) and as a (some-JLT 2015; 9(1): Brought to you by | University of Queensland -UQ Library Authenticated Download Date | 6/15/15 11:19 PM times comparatively conceived) control testing the scope of assertions or hypotheses (›control function‹). The emphasis of the use of comparison, as a rule, lies on the qualitative description of the complexity of individual selected cases, whose aesthetic value and place in literary history may thus be judged. By contrast, quantitative comparisons of a few variables within many cases are seldom used by literary scholars. Literary studies have to date hardly taken into account the contrast between quantitative and qualitative comparisons which has been so thoroughly discussed in social science, nor of the attempts to overcome this contrast (for instance through multi-value comparative quantitative analysis, which takes account not only of the need to revise hypotheses, but also the possible necessity of the revision of categories during or after the drawing of comparisons). Instead, an appeal to the ›incomparability‹ of literary art, made as early...

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Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)

Cited by 63 publications

References 0 publications

Duels in the European Novel: Honor, Reputation, and the Limits of a Bourgeois Form

Duels in the European Novel: Honor, Reputation, and the Limits of a Bourgeois Form

Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein

Vergleich als Methode? Zur Empirisierung eines philologischen Verfahrens im Zeitalter der Digital Humanities

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