From Homer's poems to contemporary science fiction, literature through the ages has continuously invented imaginary and legendary lands, projecting there all those wishes, dreams, utopias and nightmares that are too intrusive and challenging for our limited daily reality. Umberto Eco leads us on an illustrated journey through these distant, unknown lands: introducing us to their inhabitants, their heroes and villains, the passions and preoccupations that shaped them, always mindful of the continued importance of myth and legend to modern life and conciousness. Placing ancient and medieval texts beside contemporary stories, films beside poems, comics beside novels, it is a journey that is both erudite and enjoyable, and one that only Eco could have created.
Arvustused
'The illustrations are fabulous evocations of places their makers could see only in their mind's-eyes ... Eco's book is a reminder that writers and readers once travelled widely and magnificently, without ever leaving their homes or their heads' Ben Macintyre, The Times. * The Times *
Introduction. The Flat Earth and the Antipodes. Biblical Lands. The
Lands of Homer and the Seven Wonders. The Wonders of the East, from
Alexander to Prester John. The Earthly Paradise, the Isles of the Blessed
and El Dorado. Atlantis, Mu and Lemuria. Ultima Thule and Hyperborea. The
Migrations of the Grail. Alamut, the Old Man of the Mountain and the
Assassins. The Land of Cockaigne. The Islands of Utopia. The Island of
Solomon and the Austral Land. The Interior of the Earth, the Polar Myth and
Agartha. The Invention of Rennes-le-Chateau. Fictional Places and Their
Truth. Appendices.
Umberto Eco's first novel, The Name of the Rose (1982), was a huge bestseller which brought him worldwide acclaim. With his subsequent works of fiction, philosophy, literary criticism and semiotics, he has been recognised as one of Europe's finest thinkers. He is currently President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Humanistici and the University of Bologna.
