The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

Contents: 

• Alexander's pillow book
• King of the Universe : of Gilgamesh and Ashurbanipal
• Ezra and the creation of Holy Scripture
• Learning from the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus
• Murasaki and The tale of Genji: the first great novel in world history
• One thousand and one nights with Scheherazade
• Gutenberg, Luther, and the new public of print
• The Popol Vuh and Maya culture: a second, independent literary tradition
• Don Quixote and the pirates
• Benjamin Franklin: media entrepreneur in the republic of letters
• World literature: Goethe in Sicily
• Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao: readers of The Communist Manifesto, unite!
• Akhmatova and Solzhenitsyn : writing against the Soviet state
• The epic of Sunjata and the wordsmiths of West Africa
• Postcolonial literature : Derek Walcott, poet of the Caribbean
• From Hogwarts to India