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Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature
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About This Book
This "fascinating" (Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times bestselling author of Outliers ) examination of literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, shows how writers have created technical breakthroughs—rivaling scientific inventions—and engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind. Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere—from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others—each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature's great invention was to address problems we could not not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all. Wonderworks reviews the blueprints for twenty-five of the most significant developments in the history of literature. These inventions can be scientifically shown to alleviate grief, trauma, loneliness, anxiety, numbness, depression, pessimism, and ennui, while sparking creativity, courage, love, empathy, hope, joy, and positive change. They can be found throughout literature—from ancient Chinese lyrics to Shakespeare's plays, poetry to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and crime novels to slave narratives. A "refreshing and remarkable" (Jay Parini, author of Borges and An Encounter ) exploration of the new literary field of story science, Wonderworks teaches you everything you wish you learned in your English class, and "contains many instances of critical insight....What's most interesting about this compendium is its understanding of imaginative representation as a technology" ( The New York Times ).
Reviews
"The author skillfully draws attention to a number of inventions from global contexts and language backgrounds ..."
"The table of contents alone inspires a certain kind of wonder, bordering on incredulity ..."
"Fletcher, a professor of story science at Ohio State's Project Narrative, holds doctorates in both literature and neuroscience, which meet fluently in this thought-packed survey ..."
"Often these amount to merely renaming well-known literary devices; what you and I know as foreshadowing is, to Fletcher, the 'Tale Told from Our Future.' Sometimes he reduces complex forms, like the lyric poem, to basic psychotherapeutic functions ..."
"The result is a fresh take on the history of literature and a testament to the enduring power of reading."
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