Franco Moretti

The Slaughterhouse of Literature

Let me begin with a few titles: Arabian Tales, Aylmers, Annaline, Alicia de Lacey, Albigenses, Augustus and Adelina, Albert, Adventures of a Guinea, Abbess of Valiera, Ariel, Almacks, Adventures of Seven Shillings, Abbess, Arlington, Adelaide, Aretas, Abdallah the Moor, Anne Grey, Andrew the Savoyard, Agatha, Agnes de Monsfoldt, Anastasius, Anzoletto Ladoski, Arabian Nights, Adventures of a French Sarjeant, Adventures of Bamfylde Moore Carew, A Commissioner, Avondale Priory, Abduction, Accusing Spirit, Arward the Red Chieftain, Agnes de Courcy, An Old Friend, Annals of the Parish, Alice Grey, Astrologer, An Old Family Legend, Anna, Banditt’s Bride, Bridal of Donnamore, Borderers, Beggar Girl . . . It was the first page of an 1845 catalog: Columbell’s circulating library, in Derby: a small collection, of the kind that wanted only successful books. But today, only a couple of titles still ring familiar. The others, nothing. Gone. The history of the world is the slaughterhouse of the world, reads a famous Hegelian aphorism; and of literature. The majority of books disappear forever—and “majority” actually misses the point: if we set today’s canon of nineteenth-century British novels at two hundred titles (which is a very high figure), they would still be only about 0.5 percent of all published novels. And the other 99.5 percent? This is the question behind this article, and behind the larger idea of literary history that is now taking shape in the work of several critics—most recently Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, Katie Trumpener, and Margaret Cohen. The difference is that, for me, the aim is not so much a change in the canon—the discovery of precursors to the canon or alternatives to it, to be restored to a

Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)

The British novel, from 1740 to 1850. Peripheral, often despised at the beginning of the period, by its end the novel has moved very close to the core of the national culture. So, this is an important century, for this literary form. But, truth be told, the historical framework of this study has been largely dictated by an extrinsic reason: unlike earlier and later periods, from 1740 to 1850 we have very good bibliographies. Which is to say, good lists of titles; in a few years, we will have a digital archive with the full texts of (almost) all novels ever published; but for now, titles are still the best way to go beyond the 1 percent of novels that make up the canon, and catch a glimpse of the literary field as a whole. And then, titles are not just a good research tool: they are important in themselves—Walter Scott’s first word as a novelist, literally, was “title” (“The title of this work has not been chosen without the grave and solid deliberation”)1—and they are important because, as Claude Duchet has put it, they are “a coded message—in a market situation.”2 A code, in

History of the Novel, Theory of the Novel

there are many ways of talking about the theory of the novel, and mine will consist in posing three questions: Why are novels in prose? Why are they so often stories of adventures? Why was there a european but not a chinese rise of the novel in the course of the eighteenth century? Disparate as they may sound, the questions have a common source in the guiding idea of the collection The Novel: “to make the literary field longer, larger, and deeper”—historically longer, geographically larger, and morphologically deeper than those few classics of nineteenth-century Western european “realism” that have dominated the recent theory of the novel (and my own work). What the questions have in common, then, is that they all point to processes that loom large in the history of the novel but not in its theory. Here I reflect on this discrepancy and suggest a few possible alternatives.