The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature

Translation from English by Inna Kushnareva. – Moscow: Gaidar Institute Press, 2014. – 264 p. 

ISBN 978-5-93255-394-7

In this book, the outstanding Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti examines in detail the figure of the bourgeois in European literature of the New Age. The gallery of individual portraits offered by Moretti is intertwined with an analysis of key words – “useful” and “serious”, “efficiency”, “influence”, “comfort”, “roba [good, property]” and formal mutations of prose. Beginning with the “labouring gentleman” in the first chapter, through the seriousness of 19th-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the “national deformations” of the southern and eastern peripheries, and the radical self-criticism of Ibsen’s plays, this book describes the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, examining the reasons for its historical weakness and gradual retreat into the past. 

The book will be of interest to philologists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers.