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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.
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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.
From the Back Cover
From the British reviews of Why Read the Classics?
"Calvino has the precious gift of introducing a work of literature so as to make it live for the reader as it does for him ... . He explains important works of the Western canon in a style of innocent wonder." -- The Times
"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, either again and in a new way, or for the first time."-- The Daily Telegraph
"Most of the book gives an implicit answer to the book's title, but the opening essay attempts a direct one, and manages in just over six pages to give one of the most inspiring and least cliché-ridden justifications of great literature I've ever come upon."-- The Sunday Telegraph
"Like any library worthy of its name, Why Read the Classics? is full of temptations. In the person of its whimsical author it offers us the lure of his eclectic bookshelves through which Calvino guides us, pulling out books and reading us choice passages, watching our faces for reactions of astonishment and for the pleasure of learning a few new melodies before we reach the final page."-- The Observer
"This is a primer of the highest quality on the work of thirty-one classic writers ... . It's also blissfully free of academic jargon and journalistic glibness, and its erudition is matched by a real, if becomingly unflaunted, passion for literature. It makes you immediately want to read the authors in question." -- The Evening Standard
From the Inside Flap
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" may belong to another edition of this title.
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