Front cover image for Graphs, maps, trees : abstract models for a literary history

Graphs, maps, trees : abstract models for a literary history

"Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. He insists that such a move could bring new lustre to a tired field, one that in some respects is among 'the most backward disciplines in the academy'. Literary study, he argues, has been random and unsystematic. For any given period scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture."
Print Book, English, 2005
Verso, London, 2005