In this groundbreaking book, Martin Puchner leads us on a remarkable journey through time and around the globe to reveal the powerful role stories and literature have played in creating the world we have today. Puchner introduces us to numerous visionaries as he explores sixteen foundational texts selected from more than four thousand years of world literature--from the
Iliad to J. K. Rowling--and reveals 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. Indeed literature has touched the lives of generations and changed the course of history.
At the heart of this book are works, some long-lost and rediscovered, that have shaped history and civilization: the first written masterpiece, the
Epic of Gilgamesh; Ezra's creation of the Hebrew Bible as scripture; the teachings of Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus; and the first great novel in world literature,
The Tale of Genji, written by a Japanese woman known as Murasaki. Visiting Baghdad, Puchner tells about Scheherazade and the stories of
One Thousand and One Nights, and in the Americas, we watch the astonishing survival of the Maya epic
Popol Vuh. Cervantes, who invented the modern novel, battles pirates both real (when he is taken prisoner) and literary (when a fake sequel to Don Quixote is published). We learn of Benjamin Franklin's pioneering work as a media entrepreneur, watch Goethe discover world literature in Sicily, and follow the rise in influence of
The Communist Manifesto. We visit Troy, Pergamum, and China, and we speak with Nobel laureates Derek Walcott in the Caribbean and Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, as well as the wordsmiths of the oral epic
Sunjata in West Africa.
Throughout
The Written World, Puchner's delightful narrative also chronicles the inventions--writing technologies, the printing press, the book itself--that have shaped religion, politics, commerce, people, 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.
Advance praise for The Written World " Martin] Puchner creates a gripping intellectual odyssey."
--Publishers Weekly "
The Written World is not only an expansive, exuberant survey of the central importance of literature in human culture but also a great adventure story--a story of letters and paper and rocket ships, of ruthless conquerors and elegant court ladies and middle-class entrepreneurs, of the will to power and the dream of freedom. Leading the reader across a vast landscape of space and time, Martin Puchner is the perfect companion and guide."
--Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern "A unique and spellbinding book . . . Martin Puchner's dramatic storytelling leads us through the mazes and underworlds of civilization at key moments when it is being built or unbuilt.
The Written World shows the way 'great books'--and the alphabets, clay tablets, and printing presses by which they were spread--provided both the rudder and the sails for humanity's voyage across vast oceans of time."
--Elaine Scarry, author of Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare's Sonnets "From Mesopotamia to the moon,
The Written World is an imaginative, informative, and ingenious history of civilization in the form of a narrative of what people have written and read over the last four thousand years."
--Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
