Not sure if this is the right forum, Mods please do move it if you think not. But Melvyn Bragg, author, critic, TV art show programme host and part-time windbag, has compiled a list of 12 (British) books that changed the world, as stimulus for a debate that will form part of the new series of his flagship arts programme, The South Bank Show. I thought the list was interesting: CHARLES DARWIN, THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, 1859 MARIE STOPES, MARRIED LOVE, 1918 WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, SPEECH TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, 1789 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN, 1792 MAGNA CARTA, 1215 THE KING JAMES BIBLE, 1611 MICHAEL FARADAY, EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH IN ELECTRICITY, 1855 THE FIRST RULE BOOK OF THE FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION, 1863 PATENT SPECIFICATION FOR ARKWRIGHT'S SPINNING MACHINE, 1769 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, FIRST FOLIO, 1623 ADAM SMITH, THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, 1776 ISAAC NEWTON, PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, 1687 Point to make: these are not intended to be THE 12 books that changed the world, that would obviously be preposterous. And some of them are not strictly books, but there you go. My first point would be - what, no novels?
Matt, I think the only seminal "novel" England has is Robinson Crusoe (many literary critics consider it the very first novel) and I don't think its quite as admired now as it once was. So what novel would you pick? On a European scale, certainly the Divine Comedy and Don Quixote would qualify. Perhaps the Decameron as well. (Talking about novels only, of course.)
Yeah - Cervantes would be an obvious inclusion from that perspective. But the word "Dickens" also springs to mind. His writing, infused as it was by the desire (one could argue "need") to hold a mirror up to Victorian society, can reasonably be argued to have changed the world, insofar as it became a leitmotif for the progressive social causes of the day.
An American version would probably need to include Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", if only because it forever altered eighth grade school reading lists.
I guess, but which one would you choose? Great Expectations? David Copperfield? Even after you get past the obvious "he wrote for newspapers and was paid by the word" issue.
Well - Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge and The Battle of Life would be the most significant in the terms I mentioned in my previous post, although only the first of those now counts amongst his greatest works. Personally, I would also make a strong case for Blake's "Songs of Experience", which is not a novel of course and doesn't rank with some of the other non-fiction books mentioned in the initial post, but did have a pretty profound effect on society over the 100 years after it was published.
Yeah, but that profound effect was to have people stare blankly and say "wtf??" a lot. I keed, I keed. I guess Oliver Twist would take it. Never read Rarnaby Fudge (or Ethel the Aardvark goes quantity surveying, for that matter) - most of Dickens was simply too ponderous.
Changed the world? I don't think so. Any list of works by English writers that doesn't include something by Christopher Marlowe is full of suck.
I didn't like Tolstoy all that much either. Between my mother and myself we've read all of war and peace. I read the parts about war, she read the parts about love (peace). That's what happens when you read it at 11 years of age.
An American list would be interesting. I would nominate Silent Spring by Rachael Carson. I believe it was published in the late 50s and the book really launched the environmental movement. As Thomas Freidman famously pronounced, "Green is the new Red, White and Blue."
Marlowe changed literature in the same way that Shakespeare did, only a few years earlier. But I'm just being persnickety. Of course I know that the bard is more important.
In my view, the three most important philosophers, and whose works or excerpts of works are texts that REALLY changed the world are, Locke, Hume, and Bacon. No modern science without Bacon. No democracy without Locke. And no methodical understanding of human nature without Hume. One of Hume's key contributions was obliterating the arguments for what we call now "intelligent design." One book that has to be on the list of most influential is Das Kapital. Influential, of course, for all the wrong reasons.