Why Read the Classics?

About this book

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 Calvinos 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.