HE BOURGEOIS
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
