One of modern Italy's most important men of letters, Italo Calvino (1923-1985), blended fantasy, fable, and comedy in an effort to illuminate modern life, and in the process redefined the literary for...
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"After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work," Italian novelist and short ...
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Italo Calvino has long been recognized as one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century. At once experimental and accessible, he is able to fuse sophisticated narrative techniques with pl...
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Critical Essay by J. R. Woodhouse
[Calvino's] "message" for mankind seems to be to create a society in which the impediments of convention, taboo, inhibition are removed so that ...
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Critical Essay by Kristen Murtaugh
Does an Italian equivalent of Grimms's Fairy Tales exist? Italo Calvino began his research into Italian folktales with that question in mind. When it became ...
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Critical Essay by Michael Wood
Architect of scrupulously imagined, apparently fantastic, insidiously plausible words, [Italo Calvino] occupies a literary space somewhere east of Borges and west of Na...
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Critical Essay by Guido Almansi
[From] a very early stage in his career Calvino seeme to have been daunted by geometric compulsions…. The minute details of his plots, the main events of his st...
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In the following analysis of I racconti, Woodhouse shows how alienation is one of the dominant themes in Calvino's fiction.
The controversial aura which surrounds almost everything which Ita...
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In the following essay, Friedman examines Calvino's absurdist concept of time in the short stories “t zero,” “The Chase,” and “The Night Driver.”
Se...
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In the following essay, Byrne contends that “controversial though the tales may be, Our Ancestors makes an important contribution to modern literature.”
“I believe that fables ...
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In the following essay, Porush evaluates the impact of recent scientific developments—particularly the growth of cybernetics and postmodern scientific thought—on Calvino's work.
...
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In the essay below, Cannon uses the stories in Calvino's posthumous collection to support her ideas concerning his approach to, and aspirations for, writing and literature in general.
In a l...
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In the following essay, Fenwick explores issues of personal identity, sexual reproduction, and genetic continuity in “Meiosis.”
“Meiosis” is the centrepiece of a trilogy...
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In the following essay, Ricci discusses the defining characteristics of the stories comprising I racconti, asserting that the unifying theme of the collection is “the journey of man from a posi...
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In the following essay from her full-length study of Calvino's work, Adler organizes his fantasy stories into classifications, emphasizing the “wide spectrum of fanciful variations of ea...
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In the following essay, Biasin focuses on the function of food in Calvino's work, particularly his story “Sotto il sole giaguaro.”
Italo Calvino published “Sapore sapere...
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In the following essay, Weiss investigates Calvino's treatment of the individual and society in The Argentine Ant, A Plunge into Real Estate, Smog, and The Watcher.
One could say that in It...
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In the following essay, Carter asserts that realistic and fantastic elements interrelate and act as reinforcing literary modes in “Ultimo Viene il Corvo.”
Critics have often approache...
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In the following essay, White places Calvino's short fiction within the context of postmodern literature.
I'd like to talk about Italo Calvino (particularly his two science-fictive bo...
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In the following essay, Ricci views the stories in I racconti as Calvino's early narrative experiments.
The Racconti of Italo Calvino—winner of the Premio Bagutta in 1959—is a ...
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The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. W.W. Norton, 252 pages, $23.95.There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good i...
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Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Critical Essay by J. R. Woodhouse
Novelist Needs Room to Grow-Out of Her Reliance on Gimmicks
