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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.

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Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Italo Calvino," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Italo Calvino in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Italo Calvino when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Italo Calvino, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain. ... Read more

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Italo Calvino has emerged in the last few decades as a great storyteller, taking simple conceits and spinning them into fantastic tales. 'Invisible Cities' is like a series of luminous paintings that narrate an unkwown mythology. ... Read more

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A Defintion of Postmodernism at Last
All of us have wondered what postmodernism is but haven't dared to ask. By tracing the career of this noteworthy author we learn about him, his works, and the hows and whys of the present postmodern movement we live in. ... Read more

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Ricci's book ranges widely over Calvino's oeuvre to illustrate the accuracy of the idea articulated by Calvino himself that a visual image lies at the origin of all his narrative.The book's main theme is the difficult interface between word and image that Calvino struggled with throughout his career, the act of perception that rendered visible that which was invisible and transformed what was seen into what is read.Ricci holds that Calvino's narrative has an 'imagocentric' program and that his literary strategy is 'ekphrastic' i.e. it is characterized by literary description of visual representation, real or imaginary.The book is interdisciplinary in nature and will interest not only scholars of literature but also those who work with the visual arts and with information technology.

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Bernardo
The book is in excellent condition, and considering its cost on other sites, I feel I got a real bargain. ... Read more

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Examines the structure, patterns, and themes of Calvino's work
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Why did Italo Calvino decide to translate Les Fleurs bleues by Raymond Queneau? Was his translation just a way to pay a tribute to one of his models? This study looks at Calvino's translation from a literary and linguistic perspective: Calvino's I fiori blu is more than a rewriting and a creative translation, as it contributed to a revolution in his own literary language and style. Translating Queneau, Calvino discovered a new fictional voice and explored the potentialities of his native tongue, Italian. In fact Calvino's writings show a visible evolution of poetics and style that occurred rather abruptly in the mid 1960s; this sudden change has long been debated. The radical transformation of his style was affected by several factors: Calvino's new interests in linguistics, in translation theory, and in the act of translation. Translation as Stylistic Evolution analyses several passages in detail and scrutinizes quantitative data obtained by comparing digital versions of the original and Calvino's translation. The results of such assessment of Calvino's text-consistency suggest clear interpretations of the motives behind Calvino's radical and remarkable change of style that are tied to his notion of creative translation. ... Read more