Hybrid Commodities, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Challenge of Cross-Cultural Comparison: A Response to Moretti’s ‘The Novel: History and Theory’

Abstract

In his provocative article, Franco Moretti raises issues central to the criticism of the novel, and his insights generated a vibrant cross-disciplinary conversation between the authors of this response. In this essay, we introduce several alternative approaches that redirect and extend Moretti’s argument. Instead of reifying the opposition between Chinese novels (as aesthetic objects) and English novels (as commodities), we see the chiasmus of aestheticization and commodification in both novel traditions. Further, the quantitative approach to the novel field and the focus on prose excludes hybrid forms produced and consumed by women readers. The opposition of extensive, desultory reading to aesthetic concentration, we propose, came into being in the critical enterprise contemporaneous with the ‘rise’ of the novel – an enterprise grounded in the gendered economy of popular reading.