Translated by Albert Sbraglia

The Way of the World has been widely acclaimed for its unique combination of narrative theory and social history. 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 experimentation), and a rew preface in which the Moretti looks back at The Way of the World in light of his more recent work.

“This is a rich a stimulating work, bold in its theoretical formulations and extremely suggestive in its analysis of specific texts.” – Comparative Literature Studies

“At the beginning of his analysis of the nineteenth-century European novel, Franco Moretti asks a rhetorical question: How old was Hamlet? ... Hamlet is thirty years old: far from young by Renaissance standards. But our culture, in choosing Hamlet as its first symbolic hero, has “forgotten” his age, or rather has had to alter it, and pictures the Price of Denmark as a young man.” – The Independent

Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, Modern Epic, and Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900, all from Verso.