Angus Fletcher - Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature

Praise for Wonderworks

Ive been living in Wonderworks for several weeks now, dazzled by its innovations, wild surmises, gifts of insight, unlikely readings andperhaps most of allits inspirational force. Angus Fletcher is that rare critic who actually has something to say, who grabs us by the collar and hopes to shake sense into us. This may be one of the most important and truly useful books about literature written in the past decade. It opens a vista into reading that regards writing as a kind of continual experiment in human and societal engineering. That Wonderworks deserves a wide audience goes without saying. Its refreshing and remarkable on so many levels.

Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me: An Encounter

Aristotles Poetics was new and brave but was left incomplete. Angus Fletcher finishes it in Wonderworks with some help from contemporary science and an abundance of penetrating analyses. Fletcher endorses storytelling as a foundational technology but he goes beyond that to illustrate its therapeutic value and centrality to cultural invention. Wonderworks is the perfect counter to our season in hell.

Antonio Damasio, author of The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures; Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California

Find one polymath. Take a profound knowledge of world literature. Add a deep knowledge of modern psychology and of neuroscience. Add a cupful of worldly wisdom. Stir in an enchanting prose style. Heat until bubbling. You have just baked a unique, marvelous treat: Angus Fletchers Wonderworks.

Martin Seligman, author of The Hope Circuit and Learned Optimism, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania

An epic, a masterpiece. Angus Fletcher has reached deep into history and far in contemporary neuroscience to give us a magisterial synthesis of why and how humans not just make literature but use it to navigate our worlds.

Blakey Vermeule, author of Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?, Albert Gurard Professor of Literature, Stanford University

Drawing upon insights from neuroscience and evolutionary biology, an expert in the art of storytelling explains why literature matters by showing, through lucid examples, the myriad ways that literatures bag of tricks works with and for our minds. Anyone who has experienced wonder in an encounter with literature will profit from this wise and clever book.

Lawrence Manley, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, Yale University

Extraordinary. Angus Fletcher has not only set out a radical vision of literature as a technology that helps us, he has also provided a wonderfully varied and generously introduced reading list. Wonderworks brings inspiration, and an exciting challenge, to read and to think hard about literature, and its a pleasure to read.

Raphael Lyne, Professor of Renaissance Literature, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge; Fellow of Murray Edwards College

Wonderworks unleashes the transport, suspense, paradox, and power of stories. All the ideas glossedfrom Aristotle and Shakespeare to contemporary neurosciencesexhibit the literary invention that constitute the subject of the book, creating a tour-de-force of knowledge, fantasy, and the desire to heal.

Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Executive Director, Columbia Narrative Medicine, Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons

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Copyright 2021 by Angus Fletcher

Illustration credits:Illustrations on pages 145, 364 and 366 by George 'Agas Art on page 351 from Fun Home 2006 by Alison Bechdel

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2021

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This Is Just to Say, by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 19091939 (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1938). Reprinted by permission of New Directions.

Interior design by Carly Loman

Jacket design by Jackie Seow

Front jacket photograph by Jeff Spielman/Getty Images

Back jacket photograph by Joecicak/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fletcher, Angus, 1976- author.

Title: Wonderworks : the 25 most powerful innovations in the history of

literature / Angus Fletcher.

Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon &

Schuster, 2021. | Includes index. | Summary: A brilliant examination of

literary invention through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena

Ferrante, showing how writers created technical breakthroughs as

sophisticated and significant as any in science, and in the process,

engineered enhancements to the human heart and mindProvided by

publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020012458 | ISBN 9781982135973 (hardcover) | ISBN

9781982135980 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781982135997 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: LiteratureHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC PN523 .F54 2020 | DDC 809dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012458

ISBN 978-1-9821-3597-3

ISBN 978-1-9821-3599-7 (ebook)

For Ronan, aged nearly three:

Are there two Ronans here?

No. Just me!

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention

W ILLIAM S HAKESPEARE, Henry V

I t was barely sunrise.

Yet even in the faint, rose-fingered light, there could be no doubt: the invention was a marvel. It could mend cracks in the heart and resurrect hope from the dark. It could summon up raptures and impossible days. It could chase away dullness and unlatch the sky.

The invention was literature. And to catch its marvel for ourselves, lets return to that dawn. Lets learn the story of why literature was invented. And all the things it was invented to do.

Sometime around 2300 BCE, in what is now Iraq, literatures first known inventor was born within a great mudbrick palace near the snowmelt waters of the Tigris River. There, upon a fragrant cedar cot, the newborn babe was lullabied to sleep amid white rock sculptures of armies famed for the most remarkable deeds: turning mountains to ash, pouring blood into cups, and vanquishing beasts in a chasm of thorns. But soon the dreamful infant would become even more famous. Everywhere throughout the city-states of Mesopotamia, all the way from the silver mines of Anatolia to the beaches of the Persian Gulf, her name would be sung. And her name was Enheduanna.