The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature"I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals," wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature, where a gallery of individual portraits is entwined around the analysis of specific keywords – such as ‘useful’ and ‘earnest’, ‘efficiency’, ‘influence’, ‘comfort’, ‘roba’ – and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. The book charts the rise and fall of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and searches for the seeds of its failures. |
Contents
II | 38 |
III | 44 |
DOOGUlIUJN | 67 |
Behind the veil | 108 |
Influence | 121 |
Earnest | 131 |
Metamorphoses | 137 |
101 | 143 |
25 | 152 |
Ibsen and the Spirit of Capitalism | 169 |
Illustration Credits | 189 |
Common terms and phrases
adventures aesthetic Arnold Auerbach Balzac beauty become Bildungsroman bourgeois bourgeoisie butterfly capitalism capitalist century character clause comfort conflict culture D. A. Miller dark defined definiteness Defoe Defoe’s difficulty Dom Casmurro Dutch Golden Age earnest efficiency Eliot English Essay everyday fact fields figure fillers final finally find first Flaubert flow free indirect style G. W. F. Hegel Gesualdo Gothic Gothic revival Halifax Harmondsworth Hegel hegemony Ibid Ibsen idea industrial influence irrational KEYWORDS Kocka labour Literary Lab literature London look Lukacs Madame Bovary Marlow master Max Weber meaning metaphor middle class Middlemarch modern moral narrative narrator never nineteenth nineteenth-century North and South novel ofbourgeois ofthe Oxford past Peter Gay precision prose Protestant Ethic reflections Roberto Schwarz roha Rohinson Crusoe semantic sense sentences serious significant social society specific story strong things tion Torquemada turn Victorian adjectives Walter Bagehot Weber Wilhelm Wokulski words writes York