The Classics

Ah, thank you, Walter!

And Steinbeck! <smacking self on forehead> Ouch! And Thoreau! Ouch again! Would you add Emerson's Essays? Tried to read 'em in college. Didn't get tooooo far, and I majored in Philosophy.

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein, the book is wonderful, so much more involved and revealing of the society of it's time.

O'Henry - are short stories okay, the collective works are superb.

Tom Jones, I have a very old copy but I can't read it. Some of the old works are very hard to read. Hawthorne, Melville, I was able to read, but they take 3 pages to say, "So and so went to the corner store, got a paper and returned." I fall asleep.

I'm with ya there on Melville, BillW. Very tough to get through. My High School English teacher used to tell us not to read Moby Dick until we hit 30. I am now 10 years late. Oops.

And yeah, why not include short stories? If that's the case, then my fave, Franz Kafka, should be mentioned. While he did have novels (The Trial, Amerika and The Castle), I think his best work is probably The Metamorphosis, although I'd give The Trial a close second.

What about Moll Flanders? Anyone read Fielding anymore?

Jespah:

I do so love George Eliot...I have read everything she has written, but Middlemarch, considered her masterpiece, is my personal favorite. I also love Trollope and Jane Austen. In a previous and terribly unhappy marriage, I read the complete works of Dickens. I love Edith Wharton and Henry James also...

jespah re Kafka "the Penal Colony" perhaps the ultimate Kafka short story along side Metamorphosis.

It may be worthwhile to discuss what is implied when a work is designated a classic. (Perhaps not ... I'm quite happy to let others hereon decide.) But I'm wondering what it is that certain works have in common that leads us to regard them as "THE classics." There was a time when saying that a person had a classical education indicated that she/he was learned with respect to ancient Greek and Latin works, at least from the Western world perspective. But obviously if that qualification applied today, we would have to consider Shakespeare, Balzac and Dostoevski as no more than popular writers. And if we were to arbitrarily apply a timeframe of any significant number of years, say 200, that a candidate must be held in very high esteem, our American canon would be rather skimpy, if even existent.

Nevertheless, I suppose we each have some idea of what the term means, even though to spell it out would possibly be more difficult than predicting which books published in the last 20 or 50 years will be considered classics when we're all a hundred years older. I can't help but believe Catcher in the Rye will make the list.

Vietnamnurse, this evening I looked into my copy of Middlemarch. It's the Oxford World's Classics edition, 1999. The introduction is by A.S. Byatt, and she writes:

" 'What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory -- except that in a few instances this "mortal" has already put on immortality. George Eliot is one. The mysteries of human nature surpass the "mysteries of redemption", for the infinite we only suppose, while we see the finite.' Emily Dickinson wrote this in 1873, quoting St Paul on the glorious resurrected body of faith, and declaring a preference for the study of living nature. Later, a more equivocal admirer, Virginia Woolf, was to describe the book as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'. Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, and Marcel Proust admired and learned from Eliot. For many writers, and many readers, including myself, the thought of 'the novel' in the abstract is followed by the image of Middlemarch in the particular."

Jespah - I could look it up, but who wrote "Madame Bovary"? English? "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez was written in Spanish: "Cien Años de Soledad." Isabel Allende's books likewise, such as "House of the Spirits," "Eva Luna," etc. Then, there's Mario Llosa Vargas ... Of course, Homer's works are translations. My most favorite book is "Los de Abajo" ("The Underdogs") by Mariano Azuela. It's a story about the Mexican Revolution from the rebels' perspective. Azuela was there, so hopefully much of it is true.

Golly, how do we decide? There are so many!!! Shakespeare anyone? Fiction, right? Not stuff like Marx, Jefferson, Adams, or ... ?

Gustave Flaubert, French.

Well, my favourite book in the whole world is "Middlemarch" - followed by parts of "Daniel Deronda".

I love "Tom Jones" and adore Melville (I began seeing visions when I first read "Moby Dick") and Hawthorne - cannot imagine how someone could find them boring - I have read all of Dickens -'ceptin' "Chuzzlewit " and "Nickleby" - adore Austen, Gaskell, "Don Quixote", the English Renaissance, Hardy, the Brontes, lots of the Russian classics, "TRISTRAM SHANDY", SHAKESPEARE......on and on and on.....I am a classics junkie!!!!!

There is a lovely new translation of Homer's Odyssy and Iliad out -I have 'em but have not ventured in yet....

So, what we gonna discuss?

dlowen and Debacle:

I collect old copies of George Eliot's works...I have a copies of the Houghton-Mifflin series published in 1908 called the Warwickshire Edition. The plates are just marvelous. I have never seen an original...a Blackwood edition, but these plates are special.

Yes, Middlemarch is the finest...I have read it so many times. dlowen, there are some wonderful parts to Daniel Deronda, I agree. I must reread that one.

I almost took the name of Dorothea for my A2K name, but thought that I would be too presumptious!

I'd say, limit it to fiction (after all, there's a whole category called "non-fiction"). And yes, I think that's a good question - why are these considered classics? Just because they're old? Or is there something more?

Is it that the themes are so well-handled in these books? The characters are memorable? That these plots are constantly being repeated? I don't know; I'm asking you. :-D

Simplicissimus

One of the best. It was bread and butter for me growing up. It's still a big point of reference in our family.

A lot of the authors listed here I consider popular writers of their day. For classics, I'd look back hundreds of years vs. decades. Personal opinion of course.

To be a "classic" book, well, there must be more people than just me thinking so.
Which means, it must be by an (well) reputated writer.

If we call it today "classic", we ceratinly don't refer to some book, which was just popular in spring 1931 in New South-East Anglemundia [not to blame anyone].
So, a "classic" book has to be timeless and read in more just one small part of the world.

It certainly must be attractive = entertaining as well.

Well, and last but not least it should teach some kind of lesson.

Just my opinion.

Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained - Milton

Mexican Fiction
Oops! I should have said that "Los de Abajo" ("The Underdogs") is fiction. A Classic in Mexican literature. Studied in college lit courses in the U.S.A. - where I first saw it.

HOW can we decide what to discuss here? Jespah will pull the names out of a hat? Run a poll? Take a survey? More ideas? Sounds like fun! Charli

The following are classic authors whom I have enjoyed. Some are admittedly better than others. A classic is a work of enduring excellence, or the author of such works.

William Thackery
Charles Diciens
Thomas Hardy
Anthony Trollop
Jane Austin
James Joyce
Joseph Conrad
D.H. Lawrence
Henry James
Nathanial Hawthorn
Herman Melville
Mark Twain
Edith Wharton
Earnest Hemingway
F. Sott Fitzgerald
William Faulkner
John Steinbeck
Franz Kafka
Leon Tolstoy
Anton Checkov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Classic', to me, means a work that has survived the test of time and many readers/responses through the years - a process of filtering out the dross (or, in some cases, the culturally unconsidered -the process of "classicization" is, of course, like other human activities, subject to the multiple blindnesses and prejudices of "fallen " humanity - witness the re-examinationof works by "excluded" people ) and the ephemeral, leaving a heritage of works meaningful and aesthetically pleasing to many generations of people.

Simple naive version, of course!!!!

I've been lurking... listening to what you've all been saying. I'm the head book sorter for my Library Friends group (we sort and sell the books donated to our local library). I have a running argument with my book sorters... to some of them, any book they've heard of becomes a classic. I've pulled lots of books off the Classics shelf because they aren't -- let's see, recently I pulled the Watermelon Sugar poetry book... NOT a classic, the Exorcist, NO!

Originally, Classics meant Greek and Latin literature, both fiction and non-fiction. It is from that I think that we have the idea a classic is old. Still, I like to let a work age for a while before calling it a classic. I think Hemingway wrote well, but are any of his books classic? Maybe someday, but not now. Neither is anything else from the fifty-100 years just passed. I was looking around a little, found a website of Classic Works that even included Agatha Christie. I'm sorry. No not yet. Probably never. IMO.

I would be inclined to include not just fiction but all prose, drama and poetry. There are even some "classic" works of science... for example, I'd say that Darwin's Origin of the Species is a classic.

Vietnamnurse - how I love finding fellow Eliot fans!!!

Go for Dorothea - she was a wonderfully imperfect being - nobody need feel intimidated by her name!