Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History

Professor 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 luster to a tired field, one that in some respects is among “the most backwards disciplines in the academy.”

Literary study, he argues, has been random and unsystematic. For any given period scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture. Moretti offers bar charts, maps, and time lines instead, developing the idea of “distant reading,” set forth in his path-breaking essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, where the canon disappears into the larger literary system.

Charting entire genres—the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel—as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.

“Mr. Moretti makes his most forceful case yet for his approach, a heretical blend of quantitative history, geography and evolutionary theory.” — New York Times

“It’s a rare literary critic who attracts so much public attention, and there’s a good reason: few are as hell-bent on rethinking the way we talk about literature.” — Times Literary Supplement

Praise for An Atlas of the European Novel

“It’s not often that one can speak of the charm of an academic book: Moretti’s oozes it.” — Christopher Prendergast, London Review of Books

“A wonderful achievement: a visual pleasure as much as a textual one; a work in the vanguard of a new critical school that marries grand theory with a puncturing wit.” — Steven Poole, Guardian

Franco Moretti teaches literature at Stanford University and taught previously at Columbia University. He is the author of An Atlas of the European Novel, and is the editor of Il romanzo.