Culture

Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, is an award-winning author, educator, public speaker, and institution builder in the arts and humanities. His writings, which include a dozen books and anthologies and over seventy articles and essays, range from philosophy and theatre to world literature and have been translated into many languages. Through his best-selling Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX MOOC Masterpieces of World Literature, he has brought four thousand years of literature to audiences across the globe. He is a permanent member of the European Academy.

'Eminently readable ... The book's great strength lies in its ability to swoop deftly and lightly between things that may be familiar to us in themselves, but which we might be tempted to separate out in our attempts to form a picture of the world.'