Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino

Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He was an essayist and a journalist, and among his best-known works of ficition are Invisible Cities, If on a winter's night a traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. He died in 1985.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780224037297
ISBN 10	0224037293
Titel	Why Read the Classics?
Autor	Italo Calvino
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Hardback
Verlag	Vintage Publishing
Erscheinungsjahr	1999-06-10
Seitenanzahl	288
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.