![]() ![]() While The Swerve picked up these laurels in the non-fiction category, its freewheeling approach to the historical record and its allegiance to well-worn fictional cliches – the coming-of-the-prophet, the triumph-against-odds, the quest, the discovery – make it hard to place. It went on to reel in a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. Written by Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt, a doyen of New Historicism, or “cultural poetics” as it’s sometimes obscurely called, The Swerve swept all before it.Īfter not one but two positive reviews a day apart in The New York Times – “a warm, intimate book, a volume of apple-cheeked popular intellectual history” – and an excerpt in The New Yorker, the book vaulted into the NYT bestseller list. In late 2011 an intriguing work of non-fiction entitled The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began appeared in my local bookshop, although it was marketed to American readers under the even more grandiloquent subtitle, How the World Became Modern. ![]()
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