The Novel: Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, and: The Novel: Volume 2: Forms and Themes (review)

Franco Moretti's two-volume The Novel contains more than one hundred commissioned essays selected from the approximately two hundred essays in the five-volume Italian edition (Il Romanzo, Turin: G. Einaudi, 2001–2003), also edited by Moretti. In both editions the essays are categorized in three 'Registers' designed to complement each other: 'Essays' (when in quotation marks, a category), which are long studies devoted to broad topics, generally historical or thematic; 'Readings', shorter pieces on individual novels; and 'Critical Apparatus'. The two-volume edition includes forty 'Essays' organized in ten sets, five in each volume; seven sets of 'Readings', two in volume 1 and five in volume 2, each set containing on average seven articles; and two sets of seven articles each titled 'Critical Apparatus', both in volume 1.

One of the primary goals of international comparative literature studies in the last two decades has been to expand the focus of the discipline beyond the literature of Western Europe and North America. The format that The Novel introduces provides a path toward fulfilling that goal, although the difficulties that a project like Moretti's encounters are even greater than those that editors of international poetry anthologies face. If we take as an example of the latter the award-winning Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), which even in the first of its two volumes includes poems written in more than thirty languages, we can recognize the vast erudition required to choose a representative body of poems from around the world and to locate or commission acceptable translations. But the task that Moretti has set himself, although comparable, is even more complex, and not just because the literature under consideration here extends diachronically all the way to classical Greece, while the poetry anthology I mention is devoted primarily to the twentieth century.

The Novel presents, rather than selected examples of literature, selected writings about literature. If an anthology of literature is always necessarily incomplete, since there will always be another poem or story or novel that could be added to it, a collection of documents pertaining to literary works is doubly incomplete. As in an anthology, the selection of literary works addressed can always be expanded. In addition, in our increasingly decentered intellectual world, we recognize that approaches to literature vary according to the culture, socio-political system, language, body of knowledge, and particular interests of the individual scholar, who also, over the course of a career, may alter her or his views, even more than once. As vast as the body of work we recognize as literature is, the number of ideas about how to read individual works and how to categorize works and view those categories is far greater.

No collection of essays, obviously, can include all perspectives on all novels. Moretti's The Novel offers greater international breadth in the novels it addresses than in the perspectives it offers. Although the Italian edition includes a more global collection of perspectives, half the essays in the two-volume edition under review are contributed by scholars who hold appointments at institutions in the United States. In contrast, the novels addressed in the two-volume edition come from many parts of the world and were written in a number of different languages. Volume 1 includes 'Essays' devoted to the rise of the novel or the development of the novel in each of these places: ancient Greece, France, China, Spain, [End Page 313...