If there is a quality that distinguishes Franco Moretti as a literary theorist, it is his systematically undogmatic method. Throughout his critical sociology of forms, Moretti has adopted a range of models, approaches and perspectives, guided by the conviction that, as Novalis wrote, ‘theories are nets; and only those who cast will catch fish.’footnote¹ For Moretti, heterogeneity is in ‘the nature of literature itself’—‘Literature is perhaps the most omnivorous of social institutions, the most ductile in satisfying disparate social demands, the most ambitious in not recognizing limits to its own sphere of representation’—and its examination must reflect this.footnote² What unifies such eclecticism is an aptitude for connecting the very small to the very big, the local textual detail to the large-scale transformations of culture and history. The result has been a rich and multi-faceted account of literary forms and their evolution, foremost among them the novel.

What follows attempts to reconstruct his account of the development of the novel-form across several of his major works, in all their methodological diversity—Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World, The Modern Epic, Atlas of the European Novel, The Bourgeois—as well as the concomitant evolution of his theory of the novel; for what Moretti has produced is simultaneously theory and history, or rather a theory that unfolds through a history of the novel’s evolution. In reconstructing it, we will single out some central features: the novel’s relation to its great rival, tragedy; its problem-solving function; the determinations of geography, whether of the nation-state or the world-system; the interplay between style and character; and finally, some considerations on the theory’s political implications.

Given that ‘a form becomes more comprehensible and more interesting the more one grasps the conflict, or at least the difference, connecting it to the forms around it’, Moretti’s starting point is the fundamental opposition between the novel and tragedy.footnote³ In ‘The Great Eclipse’, collected in Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), he argues that the historical ‘task’ of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy was ‘the destruction of the fundamental paradigm of the dominant culture’—absolute monarchy—and that in fulfilling this desecrating function it paved the way for the English Revolution.footnote⁴ Moretti portrays this age of absolutism as separated from the age of capitalism by a fundamental historical fracture: ‘tragedy belongs to a world that does not yet recognize the inevitability of permanent conflict between opposing and immitigable interests or values, and therefore does not feel any need to confront the problem of reconciling them.’footnote⁵ As the offspring of an age marked by the permanent class conflict generated by capital, the novel is instead essentially anti-tragic. Its social function is rather the ‘composition of values in conflict’, under the sign—always precarious, always unstable—of ‘compromise’.

This notion is further elaborated in The Way of the World (1987), Moretti’s pioneering study of the Bildungsroman as a ‘symbolic form’ of European modernity. Emerging out of the conflict between the old aristocratic and new bourgeois classes, the Bildungsroman inaugurated the great season of the nineteenth-century novel. For Moretti, the genre is structured by a negotiation between the self-determination of the individual and the demands of socialization—between autonomy and integration. What emerges from his analysis is that, contrary to the Marxist view—from Lukács to the Dialectic of Enlightenment—of a heroic bourgeoisie that only relinquished its revolutionary role after 1848, bourgeois values were marked from the start by opposing tendencies, most centrally in the novels under examination, between embrace of freedom and fear of it. In the classical Bildungsroman, ‘we find the very opposite of what occurred in the summer of 1789: not a secession, but rather a convergence’. In short, the genre, with its ethos of compromise, narrates ‘how the French Revolution could have been avoided’.footnote⁶

Moretti understands that this non-revolutionary image of the bourgeoisie (and of the novel-form) may be unpopular. But he insists that such concerns be left aside:

Whether, then, it is preferable to weave patiently the veil of compromise, or to slash through it—that is another matter. My purpose here was only to clarify in what way a specific literary genre has encouraged one possible choice to the detriment of the other. Whether this anti-tragic and anti-epic tendency impressed by the novel on Western culture has been a progress or a loss, this is something we must each decide for ourselves.footnote⁷

In his account, it is with the 1815 Restoration that the novel reveals itself to be such a formidable literary form. After the betrayal of the ideals of the Revolution, the harmony between self-determination and socialization achieved in Austen and Goethe is rendered impossible. Yet the novel’s anti-tragic and anti-epic tendencies remain. The notion that the biography of a young individual entering adulthood is ‘the most meaningful viewpoint for the understanding and the evaluation of history’ was sustained for nearly a century.footnote⁸ The youthful protagonists of Stendhal, Pushkin and Lermontov, of Balzac and Flaubert, also come to accept the way of the world; yet, voided of symbolic legitimacy, this now comes at the cost of the integrity of the self.