In this book, the outstanding Italian literary critic Franco Moretti examines in detail the figure of the bourgeois in European literature of the New Age. Moretti's gallery of individual portraits is interwoven with an analysis of keywords—"useful" and "serious," "efficiency," "influence," "comfort," "roba [goods, property]" and the formal mutations of prose. Beginning with the “toiling master” in the first chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the “national deformations” of the southern and eastern periphery, and the radical self-criticism of Ibsen’s plays, this book describes the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, considering the reasons for its historical weakness and gradual decline into the past . The book is of interest to philologists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers.