In this groundbreaking book, Franco Moretti argues that literature scholars should stopreading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. In place of the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, Moretti offers charts, maps and time lines,developing the idea of “distant reading” into afull-blown experiment in literary historiography, in which the canondisappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres—the epistolary, the gothic, and the historicalnovel—as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy,Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantlydifferent from what is commonly supposed and how the concept ofaesthetic form can be radically redefined.