Sociology of Literature - World-systems Theory

World-systems Theory

Franco Moretti was, by turn, Professor of English Literature at the University of Salerno, of Comparative Literature at Verona University and of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His first book, Signs Taken for Wonders (1983) was subtitled Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms and was essentially qualitative in method. His later work, however, became progressively more quantitative.

Applying Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory to literature, Moretti argued, in Atlas of the European Novel (1998), that the nineteenth-century literary economy had comprised 'three Europes', with France and Britain at the core, most countries in the periphery and a variable semiperiphery located in between. Measured by the volume of translations in national bibliographies, he found that French novelists were more successful in the Catholic South and British in the Protestant North, but that the whole continent nonetheless read the leading figures from both. London and Paris 'rule the entire continent for over a century', he concluded, publishing half or more of all European novels.

Moretti's argument was the occasion for much subsequent controversy, collected together in Christopher Prendergaast's edited collection Debating World Literature (2004).