Why Read the Classics?

by ItaloCalvino (Author), Martin Mc Laughlin (Translator)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $14.99

  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.

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $12.13

  Why Read the Classics? is an elegant defence of the value of great literature by one of the finest authors of the last century. Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic (number one - classics are those books that people always say they are 'rereading', not 'reading'), this is an absorbing collection of Italo Calvino's witty and passionate criticism.