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, and The 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 Literature firmly 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 Literatur will prove to be an indispensable tool to Italianists and literary studies scholars.

In these widely praised essays, Calvino reflects on literature as process, the great narrative game in the course of which writer and reader are challenged to understand the world. Calvino himself made the selection of pieces to be included in this volume. Translated by Patrick Creagh. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Highlights Calvino's fascination with folk tales, knights, social & political allegories, & science fiction.

A posthumously published collection of thirty-six essays offering Italo Calvino's invigorating and illuminating analysis of his most treasured literary classics.

This book presents an analysis of the dialogue of literature and science that forms a central part of the work of Italo Calvino, one of Italy's best known contemporary authors. It provides an in-depth study of Calvino's interest in scientific models and methods and the ways these have informed his narratives.

At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was internationally regarded as one of Italy's greatest twentieth century writers. His approach to literature was remarkably adventurous, and he produced a thought-provoking oeuvre. It invited readers to engage themselves with radical thoughts and philosophies, an approach lamentably scarce in contemporary global culture. This book examines Calvino's works of fiction in the context of the philosophical ideas he advanced in his theoretical and critical works. His was an extraordinarily versatile mind, keen on experimenting with a dazzling variety of both fiction and nonfiction forms.

The Author in Criticism:Italo Calvino’s Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom explores the cultural and historic patterns and differences in the critical readings of Italian author Italo Calvino’s works in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Italy. It considers the external factors that contribute to create recognizable patterns in the readings of Calvino’s texts in different contexts. This volume therefore covers, most notably, matters of genre (science fiction, postmodernism), cultural perceptions and conventions, the (re)current image of the author in different media, academic schools, -curricula and -canons, biographical information (such as gender and background), and translation and the language in which the author speaks (or fails to speak) to us. It traces the influence of these aspects in the academic discourse on Calvino. The Author in Criticism also analyzes Calvino’s various professional roles as writer, editor, essayist, journalist, private correspondent, and public, cosmopolitan intellectual, reappraising their often little acknowledged importance for academic criticism. An important underlying idea is that the preconceived image that every critic has of Calvino before even opening one of his books is often solidified and repeated even in the most refined and complex critical analyses. This volume purposefully foregrounds the textual and non-textual parts that are usually considered peripheral to the works of an author, such as book covers, blurbs, reviews, talks, interviews, etc. In this way, this book provides insight into the reception of Calvino’s works in different countries. Moreover, it forms a broader reflection of and on important constants in the workings of literary criticism, and on the way academic discourses have developed in various cultural contexts over the last decades.