Why Read The Classics - Hardcover

Calvino, Italo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0676972349 ISBN 13: 9780676972344

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 1999

Synopsis

Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here -- spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism -- are thirty-six immediately relevant, elegantly written, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.

Following the title essay, which explores fourteen definitions of "the classic," Calvino offers writings that are at once critical appraisals and personal appreciations of, among others: Homer, Xenophon, Ovid, Pliny, Nezami, Ariosto, Cardano, Galileo, Defoe, Voltaire, Diderot, Ortes, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Twain, Henry James, Stevenson, Conrad, Pasternak, Gadda, Montale, Hemingway, Ponge, Borges, and Queneau.

At a time when the Western canon and the very notion of "literary greatness" have come under increasing disparagement by the vanguard of so-called multiculturalism, Why Read the Classics? gives us an inspiriting corrective.

About this title

About the Author

Italo Calvino's works include Numbers in the Dark, The Road to San Giovanni, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (all available from Vintage Books), The Baron in the Trees, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (available from Everyman's Library), Invisible Cities, Marcovaldo, and Mr. Palomar. Calvino died in 1985.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0676972349
• ISBN 13: 9780676972344
• Binding: Hardcover