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Greenblatt, Stephen (Author) & Lucretius (Subject) : The Swerve: How The World Became Modern

W. W. Norton & Company, New York City, NY, 2011

ISBN 0393064476

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 356 pages. Book-length account on subject. One of the most important books of our time. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only that sold out shortly after publication. Does NOT have either the National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize Winner logo-imprint. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve: How The World Became Modern". His compelling historical narrative-argument that the idea of modernity was made possible by the re-discovery during the Italian Renaissance of the Roman Era ancient text, Lucretius' "De Rerum Natura" ("On The Nature of Things"). One of the foundational and greatest books of Western civilization, it has been recognized as such since its fortuitous re-discovery. As a work of literature, it is a timeless classic: Lucretius writes with a profoundly personal voice that is lucid, riveting, and brilliant on every page, in which a ground-breaking worldview is fully articulated, and the reader sees the world as if for the very first time. The inspiration for intellectual autobiographies as diverse as Montaigne's "Essays", Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams", and Claude Levi-Strauss' "Tristes Tropiques", "De Rerum Natura" is also the first non-scientific (and anti-religious) book to anticipate by more than one thousand years modern science, the atom being posited by Lucretius to constitute our universe long before it could be proven to actually exist. The abiding tenet of contemporary culture is "Make It New", cultural amnesia, that is, willful forgetting (of admittedly, an often painful past), as the only viable option for progress or meaningful and positive change. Surely, the Renaissance knew better when it revived Western civilization and made modernity (that is, the Present) possible by going all the way back to the Past, "Make It Old". "Turns his attention to the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture's foundation" (The New York Times). An absolute "must-have" title for Stephen Greenblatt collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black pen-marker on the title page by Stephen Greenblatt. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. Laid-in is a pristine copy of the Souvenir Material of the event during which his signature was obtained. This title is a great book. This is one of few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. Please note: This copy does NOT have either the National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize Winner logo-imprint. Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. Winner of the National Book Award in 2011 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for "The Swerve: How The World Became Modern". One of the most brilliant historian/scholar/thinkers of our time. A fine collectible copy. . ISBN 0393064476.

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