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Italo Calvino's "Perché leggere i classici" ("Why Read the Classics?"), is a collection of essays and introductions to famous works. Translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin, "Calvino's literary essays are invigorating, thought-provoking, and pleasurable reading" (Kirkus Reviews).
From the Publisher:
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.
Italo Calvino's works include Numbers in the Dark, The Road to San Giovanni, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, The Baron in the Trees, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Invisible Cities, Marcovaldo, and Mr. Palomar. Calvino died in 1985.
Details:
ISBN: 0679743499
ISBN-13: 9780679743491
Pages: 278
Format: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books, Random House Inc.
Location: New York
Printed: in the USA
Edition: First Vintage Book Edition December 2000 (with full # line).
Contents:
Translator's Introduction vii
Preface 1
Why Read the Classics? 3
The Odysseys Within The Odyssey 11
Xenophon's Anabasis 19
Ovid and Universal Contiguity 25
The Sky, Man, the Elephant 37
Nezami's Seven Princesses 47
Tirant lo Blanc 53
The Structure of the Orlando Furioso 59
Brief Anthology of Octaves from Ariosto 69
Gerolamo Cardano 77
The Book of Nature in Galileo 83
Cyrano on the Moon 91
Robinson Crusoe, Journal of Mercantile Virtues 97
Candide, or Concerning Narrative Rapidity 103
Denis Deiderot, Jacques le Fataliste 107
Giammaria Ortes 113
Knowledge as Dust-cloud in Stendhal 119
Guide for New Readers of Stendhal's Charterhouse 131
The City as Novel in Balzac 139
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 145
Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes 151
Leo Tolstoy, Two Hussars 155
Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg 159
Henry James, Daisy Miller 165
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Pavilion on the Links 169
Conrad's Captains 173
Pasternak and the Revolution 179
The World is an Artichoke 197
Carlo Emilio Gadda, The Pasticciaccio 201
Eugenio Montale, 'Forse un mattino andando' 209
Montale's Cliff 219
Hemingway and Ourselves 223
Francis Ponge 231
Jorge Luis Borges 237
The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau 245
Pavese and Human Sacrifice 261
Publisher's Note 265
Index 269
Subject(s) Canon, Literature, History, Literary Criticism
