The Way of the World

The Bildungsroman in European Culture

By: Franco Moretti, Albert Sbragia (Translator)

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Paperback | 17 September 2000 | Edition Number 2

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Paperback
292 Pages

Edition Type
New edition

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.7 x 1.8

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Wilhelm Meister, Elizabeth Bennet, Julien Sorel, Rastignac, Jane Eyre, Bazaroz, Dorothea Brooke ... the golden age of the European novel discovers a new collective protagonist: youth. It is problematic and restless youth—"strange" characters, as their own creators often say—arising from the downfall of traditional societies. But even more than that, youth is the symbolic figure for European modernity: that sudden mix of great expectations and lost illusions that the bourgeois world learns to "read", and to accept, as if it were a novel.
The Way of the World, with its unique combination of narrative theory and social history, interprets the Bildungsroman as the great cultural mediator of nineteenth-century Europe: a form which explores the many strange compromises between revolution and restoration, economic take-off and aesthetic pleasure, individual autonomy and social normality. This new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the Bildungsroman in the years around the First World War (a crisis which opened the way for modernist experiments), and a new preface in which the author looks back at The Way of the World in the light of his more recent work.

Industry Reviews

"A pointed axample of the nature of youth, as represented in the novels of Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Goethe and Stendhal... [Moretti] is undoubtedly a brilliant and searching critic." - Independent "A short, brilliant, provocative and often entertainingly upbeat book." - New Society

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You Can Find This Book In

Non-Fiction Sociology & Anthropology Literature, Poetry & Plays History & Criticism of Literature Literary Theory Literary Studies of Fiction General Literary Studies Literary Studies from 1500 to 1800 Literary Studies from 1800 to 1900

Preface: Twenty Years Later	p. v
Acknowledgements	p. 1
Introduction: The Bildungsroman as Symbolic Form	p. 3
The Comfort of Civilization	p. 15
The Ring of Life
The Rhetoric of Happiness
Anti-Robinson
Aesthetic Education
The Art of Living
Personality
Trial, Opportunity, Episode
Conversation
'Inevitable evils'
The Sociology of Prejudice
Symbol and Interpretation
Escape from Freedom
Of Necessity, Virtue
Waterloo Story	p. 75
Politics as Destiny?
'The uniform of my generation'
Homo Clausus
Bovarysm, Disavowal, Bad Faith
The Age of Ideals
'That's the way of the world'
Reality principle, realism, irony
The Automaton's Rights
'A parody, perhaps ...'
Socialization Rejected
'A certain amount of impudence'
Streben
'All ties cast off'
Unhappy Ending
Irony and Irrationality
The Fall of Wisdom
The Waterloo Paradox
The World of Prose	p. 129
Parvenir
In Fashion
The Balzacian Narrator (I): 'Nothing is hidden from me'
The Balzacian Narrator (II): 'At a time like this it would be a wonderful spectacle ...'
Capitalism and Narration
Fifty Thousand Young Men. One Hundred Thousand Novels
On the Genesis of Tolerance
'Narration'
Balzac At His Very Worst
The World of Prose
Dialectics of Desire
'And in return, what do you hope to take?'
Forever Young?
The Conspiracy of the Innocents	p. 181
The Confinement of Youth
The White and the Black
Very Common Persons
Anthropological Garden
'In this enlightened age ...'
The Devil's Party
The Hero in Exile
Ur-Novel
The Great Tribunal of the World
'Narratio' versus Novel
'To alter the world a little'
Eliot's Narrator: Maturity as Humour
End of a Genre
'A Useless Longing for Myself': The Crisis of the European Bildungsroman, 1898-1914	p. 229
Notes	p. 246
Index	p. 272
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

The Way of the World

The Bildungsroman in European Culture

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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