Revisiting Franco Moretti’s Concept and Practice of Literary Geography

Authors

  • Shuping Chen Huaqiao University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21512/lc.v18i1.10747

Keywords:

Franco Moretti, literary geography, literary map

Abstract

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.

Dimensions

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

2024-03-28
Abstract 68  .
PDF downloaded 2  .