About this item
Inspired by Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard University's department of comparative literature and founder of Harvard's Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic's restrictions on travel by exploring eighty exceptional books from around the globe. Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel Prize-winners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways in which the world bleeds into literature. To chart the expansive landscape of world literature today, Damrosch explores how writers live in two very different worlds: the world of their personal experience and the world of books that have enabled great writers to give shape and meaning to their lives.
About the Author
David Damrosch was born in Maine and raised there and in New York. He studied at Yale, where he pursued interests in a wide range of ancient and modern languages and literatures. He then taught for three decades at Columbia before moving in 2009 to Harvard, where he chairs the Department of Comparative Literature. A past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, he has written widely on comparative and world literature, and his work has been translated into an eclectic variety of languages, including Chinese, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Vietnamese.
