10 Novels that Changed the World
A Video Talk
Writers give us new modes of writing and, hence, new modes of thinking. There is no doubt that fiction brings change by giving us the chance to walk in the shoes of another person, to empathise with those who are different from us in some way. To understand history because we enter it through a story, to speculate on the future if we read science fiction. To make us travel to lands we might never get to in real life and to experience other cultures. Fiction, I think, lets us try on another life for size.
This talk examines ten novels that altered our world.
Access to this 60-minute video is available for purchase to watch when and as often as you like. Please use the link to purchase a code that will be sent to you via email.
You will have been sent an email with the access code. Please check your spam! Contact me if you don’t see it.
- After purchase you will be offered a link to download a file. This contains your access code. Please download it.
- You are buying access to a fully edited online video of 60 minutes in duration.
- Includes an illustrated presentation by Susannah Fullerton.
- Reading recommendations for biographies, books, videos and more.
- Watch as often as you want
- Buy now!
It’s really easy to order. Just use the purchase button above to buy online via my shop. Payment is via credit card. After completion, you will receive access to a file that includes the information you need to access the video. Please check your email.
Order online for immediate access. Payment via credit card.
Phone orders, please see here.
100% guaranteed. If you don’t feel this product is great value for money, please let me know why and I will refund your purchase price.
“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.” ― Malala Yousafzai, ‘I Am Malala’
Literature has always had the power to change – just think of the impact of the King James Bible, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique. And yet fiction too has the power to change – to evoke sympathy, to make us take on different opinions, and even to bring about political and legal change.
There are books that have changed attitudes to women like The Women’s Room, attitudes to animals like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty which argued for better treatment of working horses. There are books that have argued for change in the treatment of the poor such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. There are books that have made us think about violence, poverty, drugs, such as Go Ask Alice, about nature versus nurture, such as Goldings’ Lord of the Flies. There are books that have done wonderfully creative things in fiction, such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy which was incredibly modern when it was published in the 18th century. It can be seen as leading a direct path to James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
Reading novels can change us. And if enough people read fiction and experience it in different ways then there is no doubt that novels can change our world.