Do-It-Yourself
George Steiner, 23 May 1996
The Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez
by Franco Moretti, translated by Quentin Hoare.
Verso, 250 pp., £44, March 1996,1 85984 934 2 Show More
by Franco Moretti, translated by Quentin Hoare.
Verso, 250 pp., £44, March 1996,
“... those between, say, Tolstoy and Homer or Mann and Goethe. It is against this implicit model that Franco Moretti sets out his merry bricolage (a favourite word). The pivotal works in literary modernity, from Goethe’s Faust II to García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude are ‘epics’ of a distinctive kind and lineage. They are ... ”