Revisiting Franco Moretti’s Concept and Practice of Literary Geography
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21512/lc.v18i1.10747Keywords:
Franco Moretti, literary geography, literary mapAbstract
The research talked about Franco Moretti, an influential Italian literary critic who had made significant contributions to the field of literary geography, a cross-disciplinary theory that utilized geographical methods to analyze and understand literary and cultural materials. Moretti’s approach to literary geography diverged from traditional and orthodox methods, offering a fresh perspective. This research applied a qualitative method with a close-reading approach to evaluate and explore Moretti’s conceptualization and implementation of literary geography through a systematic three-step research process. The first step involved identifying the intellectual and theoretical sources of inspiration that have influenced Moretti’s work. The second step focused on illuminating Moretti’s innovative understanding and interpretation of literary geography as well as his integration of literary maps into the analysis of literature. Lastly, the research investigated two case studies to further exemplify Moretti’s practices in the field of literary geography. The first case study regarded Jane Austen’s fiction, where Moretti’s approach unveils Austen’s geographical imagination of Britain in her novels. The second one centers on Mary Mitford’s ‘Our Village’, where Moretti discovered the circular narrative pattern. By undertaking these three comprehensive steps, this research offers valuable insights into literary geography’s conceptual and methodological dimensions. Additionally, it endeavors to cultivate a deeper appreciation for the interdisciplinary nature of literary geography, thereby inspiring scholars and researchers to delve further into the intersections between geography, literature, and culture.
Plum Analytics
References
Anderson, B. (2019). Cultural geography II: The force of representations. Progress in Human Geography, 43(6), 1120–1132. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518761431.
Andrew, L. M. (2018). Towards a Political Literary Geography. Literary Geographies, 4(2), 34–37.
Arseniev, P. (2021). To See the Forest Behind the Trees: “Biological Bias in Literary Criticism” from Formalism to Moretti. Russian Literature, 122, 67–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2021.07.004.
Bushell, S., Butler, J. O., Hay, D., & Hutcheon, R. (2022). Digital Literary Mapping: I. Visualizing and Reading Graph Topologies as Maps for Literature. Cartographica, 57(1), 11–36. https://doi.org/10.3138/cart-2021-0008.
Cistelecan, A. (2020). Novel and Anti-Novel. Moretti Before Distant Reading. Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 6(2), 5–22. https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2020.10.01.
Ercolino, S. (2021). Unrestrained individuation the young Franco Moretti. Historical Materialism, 29(2), 100–118. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341961.
Hones, S. (2017). Literary Geography. In D. Richardson, N. Castree, M. F. Goodchild, A. Kobayashi, W. Liu, & R. A. Marston (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Geography (pp. 1–6). New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0312.
Marková, I., & Novaes, A. (2020). Chronotopes. Culture and Psychology, 26(1), 117–138. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X19888189.
McLaughlin, D. (2019). Introduction: Collaborations in Literary Geography. Literary Geographies, 5(1), 1–6.
Moretti, F. (1998). Atlas of the European novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso.
Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso.
Moretti, F. (2020). Under which king, bezonian? Literary studies between hermeneutics and quantification. Porownania, 26(1), 315–328. https://doi.org/10.14746/POR.2020.1.18.
Moretti, F., & Sobchuk, O. (2019). Hidden in Plain Sight: Data Visualization in the Humanities. New Left Review, 118, 86–115.
Pilshchikov, I. (2022). Old and “New” Quantitative Formalism (The Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Stanford Literary Lab). Literatura: Teoria, Historia, Critica, 24(1), 265–295. https://doi.org/10.15446/LTHC.V24N1.98440.
Taylor, J. E., Donaldson, C. E., & Gregory, I. N. (2018). Mapping digitally, mapping deep: Exploring digital literary geographies. Literary Geographies, 4(1), 10–19.
Velmezova, E., & Kull, K. (2021). Franco Moretti on semiotics and academic mobility. Cahiers Du Centre de Linguistique et Des Sciences Du Langage, 65, 91–102. https://doi.org/10.26034/la.cdclsl.2021.1363.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Shuping Chen
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License - Share Alike that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
c. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
USER RIGHTS
All articles published Open Access will be immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. We are continuously working with our author communities to select the best choice of license options, currently being defined for this journal as follows: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC BY-SA)