Items related to Why Read the Classics
Why Read the Classics is a collection of thirty-six essays by Italo Calvino on 'his' classics: the writers, poets and scientists who had meant most to him at different stages of his life. After the title essay, which explores several original definitions of what makes a classic, the pieces range in time from antiquity (Homer, Ovid) through early modern and Enlightenment Europe (Ariosto, Defoe, Diderot, Voltaire) to the masters of the nineteenth-century novel (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy, Conrad), before dealing with Calvino's early American mentors (Twain, James, Hemingway) and contemporaries such as Borges, Pasternak and Queneau. The essays also offer the most comprehensive sample yet available of Calvino the literary critic in substantial articles which he wrote over a period of thirty years from the 1950s to his death in 1985. Why Read the Classics constitutes Calvino's literary canon, sheds fascinating light on the key texts which influenced this major twentieth-century fantasist and postmodernist, and proves that even if he had not become an internationally renowned fiction writer Calvino would have ranked among the most interesting essayists and critics of the twentieth century.
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Review:
'Enthusiasm and intelligence: these are the essential qualities of the critic. Calvino, himself a novelist of rare quality, possessed both generously. This is a book to read for itself, and also because it will send you back to other books to read, either again in a new way, or for the first time... Superb' Daily Telegraph 'This volume itself is a classic book at bedtime, a seductive invitation to forgotten opportunities or rereading' The Times
Book Description:
--'One of the most inspiring justifications of great literature I've ever come upon' Sunday Telegraph--'This volume itself is a classic book at bedtime, a seductive invitation to forgotten opportunities or rereading' The Times
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- PublisherHarcourt
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0156011301
- ISBN 13 9780156011303
- BindingHardcover
- Rating
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