Reviews

The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture by Albert Sbragia, Franco Moretti

rociog's review against another edition

5.0

Moretti's caffeinated prose makes the perusal of The Way of the World a highly enjoyable affair. A mix between theory of the novel and social history, it tackles the cultural significance of the great nineteenth-century novel: the Bildungsroman. Thoroughly wide-reaching and thought provoking.

My one gripe is that I found Moretti too inclined to look down on the pre-Eliot English Bildungsroman in relation to its continental counterpart. He is perhaps too eager to ignore the ethical and narrative complexity of Dickens, Fielding and Charlotte Brontë in order to declare George Eliot the single good English artist that engaged with the form (perhaps with the exception of Jane Austen).

alexlanz's review against another edition

The sequence of the bourgeois social novel is driven by the contradiction between the autonomous individual and the socialization necessary to maintain a modern bourgeois state, which then propagates the value of individual freedom. On the continent, these novels articulate a seamless unity between becoming oneself and becoming a productive citizen, making the revolution of '89 unnecessary; but after 1815 this ideology becomes unworkable. In Britain, the logic of the fairy tale is enough to enshrine the ideology of English common law. The whole sequence comes to an end when the European novel of the ego confronts the unconscious.