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Between History And Theory

From Signs Taken for Wonders to The Bourgeois, Franco Moretti has developed a changing, multifaceted sociology of the novel. In this critical reconstruction, Enrica Villari parses the theory that unfolds from his pioneering account of the form’s evolution—through Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Eliot, García Márquez—and considers its political implications.

Duty

In diametric contrast, a sense of duty as the condition of an ethical life in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. No longer, however, dictated by tradition or convention, but designed as individual choice—in illusion or fulfillment—through the modest routines of daily life.