Reviews

Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez by Quintin Hoare, Franco Moretti

alexlanz's review against another edition

Really clears the groundwork regarding the great mega novels of the 19th and 20th centuries, which represent the forced unity of a diverse capitalist and imperialist world system through its polyphonic and monologic tendencies. Stream of consciousness is a technique also divided in tendency and history. Similar historiographical arguments as Way of the World (long periods of inertia and rare explosions of innovation), his bildungsroman book, but this one is more compelling and better argued.