eBook

Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature

Bolongaro, Eugenio

2003,2014

Overview

Looking at five of Italo Calvino's often neglected early novels:The Young People of Po,The Cloven Viscount,The Baron in the Trees,The Non-Existent Knight, andThe Watcher, Eugenio Bolongaro argues that these works, written between 1948 and 1963, contain a sustained meditation on the role of the intellectual and on the irreducible ethical and political dimension of literature. This meditation provides an insight into a crucial moment in Calvino's development as a writer, and allows Bolongaro to lay the groundwork for a more 'political' reading of Calvino's later work. Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literaturefirmly situates Calvino within his historical context - the cultural revival of post-World War II Italy - by relating these early novels to Calvino's political and critical writings which played an important role in the cultural debates of the time. This approach provides a key to understanding Calvino's work in a new light, ably demonstrating that Calvino's full literary significance cannot be understood in isolation from the politics and cultural movements of the period. One of the few book-length English-language works on Calvino's early writings,Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literaturwill prove to be an indispensable tool to Italianists and literary studies scholars.

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press,University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing
• Subject: Calvino, Italo / Calvino, Italo-Criticism and interpretation / Criticism and interpretation / European / Italian / Language & Literature / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / European / Italian / LITERARY CRITICISM / General
• ISBN: 0802087639, 9780802087638, 9781442676343, 1442676345