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Table of Contents
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About The Book
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 solve: 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 Me: 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).
About The Reader
Why We Love It
“From the moment I read the original proposal for this book to the present day, I have wanted to publish this book. It is a tour of thousands of years of literature that takes a radically different approach from any you’ve previously encountered in college or elsewhere. The emphasis is on invention, and it shows us why invention in literature is as valuable and brilliant as invention in microbiology or quantum physics. There are dozens of works of literature described in a refreshingly new way in this book. They range from Homer and Sophocles to Dante and Shakespeare to Jane Austen, George Eliot, Frederick Douglass, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ursula Le Guin, Alison Bechdel, and Elena Ferrante. There is poetry from Sappho to Cao Xuequin, and T. S. Eliot. It is a literary feast, and every work of literature is fresh and new under Fletcher’s microscope.”
—Bob B., VP, Executive Editor, on Wonderworks
Product Details
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio (March 9, 2021)
- Runtime: 15 hours and 11 minutes
- ISBN13: 9781797120188
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): Wonderworks Unabridged Audio Download 9781797120188
- Author Photo (jpg): Angus Fletcher Photograph by Sarah Lagrotteria(0.1 MB)
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