Italo Calvino and Classics

In his Memos for the Next Millennium, the Italian writer Italo Calvino identified five literary qualities that should accompany writers and readers into the literature of the future: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity. Though never finished, the Memos continue to inspire readers and scholars. This volume turns three of Calvino’s poetic qualities – lightness, quickness, multiplicity – into powerful hermeneutic strategies for reading ancient and late antique texts, ranging widely from Homer’s Iliad to Claudian’s carmina minora. It is the first book to read ancient literature through the lens of Calvino’s Memos, thus fostering a new discussion of the interactions between modern and ancient texts as well as between methodologies.

Lisa Cordes is Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Humboldt University, Berlin. She has published on Neronian and Flavian literature, panegyric rhetoric, gender studies in antiquity and ancient concepts of fiction, authorship and the literary character.

Marco Formisano is Professor of Latin literature at Ghent University. He has published extensively on late antique literature, early Christian martyr acts, ancient technical and scientific texts, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He is the editor of the series “sera tela. Studies in Late Antique Literature and its Reception” (Bloomsbury, London).

Janja Soldo is Lecturer in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Seneca Epistulae Morales Book 2. A Commentary with Text, Translation & Introduction (OUP 2021) and has published a co-edited volume and articles on ancient epistolography.

Contributors are: Kathleen M. Coleman, Lisa Cordes, Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, Sabine Föllinger, Marco Formisano, Therese Fuhrer, Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Stephen Harrison, Martin Hose, Christoph Markschies, Gernot Michael Müller, Paolo Felice Sacci, Renate Schlesier, Janja Soldo, Jan R. Stenger, Tobias Uhle, Antje Wessels, Christopher Whitton.