num_pages: 228
description: I am a member of the bourgeois class feel myself to be such and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals wrote Max Weber in 1895. Who could repeat these words today?Thus begins Franco Morettis study of the bourgeois in modern European literature where a gallery of individual portraits is entwined around the analysis of specific keywords  such as useful and earnest efficiency influence comfort roba  and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. The book charts the rise and fall of bourgeois culture exploring the causes for its historical weakness and searches for the seeds of its failures.
language: English
title: The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature
publisher: Verso