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Investigating the literary culture of the early interaction between European countries and East Africa, Edward Wilson-Lee uncovers an extraordinary sequence of stories in which explorers, railway labourers, decadent émigrés, freedom fighters, and pioneering African leaders made Shakespeare their own in this alien land.Whilst travelling in Luxor, Edward Wilson-Lee encountered a man who called out to him from the summer shade with lines from Shakespeare's Macbeth: 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow….' Unable to resist the temptation, Wilson-Lee responded with the next line and so began a fascination with unexpected cultural encounters, especially those made memorable by the poignancy of discovering beauty out of place.Shakespeare may have heard of Luxor (although he would have known it as Thebes) but it is unlikely that he imagined his lines ever being spoken there, close by the feluccas sailing on the Nile and the acres of pharaonic ruins beyond.This radical, breath-taking book combines travel, history, biography and satire in an ode to Shakespeare. Wilson-Lee teaches Shakespeare at Cambridge but grew up in East Africa and Shakespeare in Swahililand explores Shakespeare’s global legacy like no other book before it. In these pages explorers stagger through Africa's interior accompanied by Shakespeare; eccentrics live out their dreams on the African Savannah with Shakespeare by their side; decadent emigres, railway labourers, Indian settler communities, African intellectuals and rebels all turned to Shakespeare and adapted his plays to fit their needs. The book examines how Shakespeare influenced the first African leaders of independent nations, Cold War intrigues and even Che Guevara.With its extraordinary sequence of stories and momentous travels from Zanzibar, through Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan, this literary adventure throws high culture and the wild together in celebration of Shakespeare's legacy as a poet of the world.

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Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet

Without libraries, what have we? We have no past and no future. This book tells for the first time in English the story of the first great universal library in the age of printing – and of the son of Christopher Columbus who created it.This is the scarcely believable – and wholly true – story of Christopher Columbus' bastard son Hernando, who sought to equal and surpass his father's achievements by creating a universal library. His father sailed across the ocean to explore the known boundaries of the world for the glory of God, Spain and himself. His son Hernando sought instead to harness the vast powers of the new printing presses to assemble the world’s knowledge in one place, his library in Seville.Hernando was one of the first and greatest visionaries of the print age, someone who saw how the scale of available information would entirely change the landscape of thought and society.His was an immensely eventual life. As a youth, he spent years travelling in the New World, and spent one living with his father in a shipwreck off Jamaica. He created a dictionary and a geographical encyclopaedia of Spain, helped to create the first modern maps of the world, spent time in almost every major European capital, and associated with many of the great people of his day, from Ferdinand and Isabel to Erasmus, Thomas More, and Dürer. He wrote the first biography of his father, almost single-handedly creating the legend of Columbus that held sway for many hundreds of years, and was highly influential in crafting how Europe saw the world his father reached in 1492. He also amassed the largest collection of printed images and of printed music of the age, started what was perhaps Europe's first botanical garden, and created by far the greatest private library Europe had ever seen, dwarfing with its 15,000 books every other library of the day.Edward Wilson-Lee has written the first major modern biography of Hernando – and the first of any kind available in English. In a work of dazzling scholarship, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books tells an enthralling tale of the age of print and exploration, a story with striking lessons for our own modern experiences of information revolution and Globalisation.

литературоведение

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library

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