A dazzling account of the development of American cultural hegemony from one of the world’s leading literary theorists. Franco Moretti, acclaimed author of Graphs, Maps, Trees and Distant Reading, distils a lifetime of teaching and research to present the university, in the form of an essay . Ranging from poetry and the novel to theatre and the visual arts, Far Country juxtaposes canonical figures in American art and letters with European counterparts-Whitman and Baudelaire, Hemingway and Joyce, Miller and Brecht, Hopper and Vermeer-charting ruptures in the medium of form that have transformed the cultural landscape on either side of the Atlantic over the past century.