The Written World

Reprint

Puchner, Martin 저자(글)

Random House Publishing Group · 2018년 07월 24일

책 소개

The story of literature in sixteen acts-from Homer to Harry Potter, including The Tale of Genji, Don Quixote, The Communist Manifesto, and how they shaped world history

In this groundbreaking book, Martin Puchner leads us on a remarkable journey through time and around the globe to reveal the how stories and literature have created the world we have today. Through sixteen foundational texts selected from more than four thousand years of world literature, he shows us how writing has inspired the rise and fall of empires and nations, the spark of philosophical and political ideas, and the birth of religious beliefs.

We meet Murasaki, a lady from eleventh-century Japan who wrote the first novel, The Tale of Genji, and follow the adventures of Miguel de Cervantes as he battles pirates, both seafaring and literary. We watch Goethe discover world literature in Sicily, and follow the rise in influence of The Communist Manifesto. Puchner takes us to Troy, Pergamum, and China, speaks with Nobel laureates Derek Walcott in the Caribbean and Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, and introduces us to the wordsmiths of the oral epic Sunjata in West Africa. This delightful narrative also chronicles the inventions-writing technologies, the printing press, the book itself-that have shaped people, commerce, and history. In a book that Elaine Scarry has praised as “unique and spellbinding,” Puchner shows how literature turned our planet into a written world.

Praise for The Written World

“It’s with exhilaration . . . that one hails Martin Puchner’s book, which asserts not merely the importance of literature but its all-importance. . . . Storytelling is as human as breathing.”-The New York Times Book Review

“Puchner has a keen eye for the ironies of history. . . . His ideal is ‘world literature,’ a phrase he borrows from Goethe. . . . The breathtaking scope and infectious enthusiasm of this book are a tribute to that ideal.”-The Sunday Times (U.K.)

“Enthralling . . . Perfect reading for a long chilly night . . . [Puchner] brings these works and their origins to vivid life.”-BookPage

“Well worth a read, to find out how come we read.”-Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

작가정보

저자(글) Puchner, Martin

Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His prizewinning books cover subjects from philosophy to the arts, and his bestselling six-volume Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX MOOC (massive open online course) have brought four thousand years of literature to students across the globe. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

목차

• Introduction: Earthrise
  Map and Timeline of the Written World
  
  Chapter 1: Alexanders Pillow Book
  Chapter 2: King of the Universe: Of Gilgamesh and Ashurbanipal
  Chapter 3: Ezra and the Creation of Holy Scripture
  Chapter 4: Learning from the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus
  Chapter 5: Murasaki andThe Tale of Genji: The First Great Novel in World History
  Chapter 6: One Thousand and One Nights with Scheherazade
  Chapter 7: Gutenberg, Luther, and the New Public of Print
  Chapter 8: ThePopol Vuhand Maya Culture: A Second, Independent Literary Tradition
  Chapter 9: Don Quixote and the Pirates
  Chapter 10: Benjamin Franklin: Media Entrepreneur in the Republic of Letters
  Chapter 11: World Literature: Goethe in Sicily
  Chapter 12: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao: Readers ofThe Communist Manifesto, Unite!
  Chapter 13: Akhmatova and Solzhenitsyn: Writing Against the Soviet State
  Chapter 14: TheEpic of Sunjataand the Wordsmiths of West Africa
  Chapter 15: Postcolonial Literature: Derek Walcott, Poet of the Caribbean
  Chapter 16: From Hogwarts to India
  
  Acknowledgements
  Notes
  Illustration Credits
  Index

기본정보

ISBN	9780812988277 ( 0812988272 )
발행(출시)일자	2018년 07월 24일
쪽수	480쪽
크기	155 * 231 * 41 mm / 590 g
총권수	1권
언어	영어