Italo Calvino as World Literature

The year 2023 marked the centenary of Italo Calvino’s birth: a century characterized by an ever-increasing world-wide interest in Calvino, one of the most representative authors of contemporary Italian literature.

Italo Calvino as World Literature looks at the writer’s production in translation, at the diverse relations it has had with different cultures of the world, and at its reception across disciplines and media. In the process, Calvino’s own understanding of culture emerges as a porous entity with limited or no disciplinary boundaries, and his oeuvre as a luminous specimen of world literature.

Not only have Calvino’s books been translated into 56 languages, but they have also absorbed specificities from several languages, rhetorical strategies from various genres, and tropes from disparate media. Moreover, Calvino elaborated the literature of many different traditions and entered into dialogue with disciplinary areas as diverse as ecology, anthropology, sociology, and politics. The essays in this volume will unravel these multiple threads by engaging primarily with questions of translation and translatability, cultural proximities, as well as cross-disciplinary and transmedia exchanges.

Each chapter in Italo Calvino as World Literature takes one or more of Calvino’s books – from both his narrative and essayistic production – as a starting point to foreground the depth and breadth of the world-literature relevance of his rich and stratified oeuvre. The book will also be enriched by three interludes and a coda, adapting Calvino’s multifarious production to different forms of creative expression, including graphic, radio, and musical ones.