Classics of World Literature
Wide international distribution alone is not a sufficient condition for attributing works to world literature. The decisive factor is an exemplary artistic value and the influence of the respective work on the development of humankind and science in general, and on the development of literature(s) of the world in particular. An agreement on universally accepted criteria to decide what works have literary world ranking is not easy, especially since individual works have to be considered in their respective temporal and regional contexts.
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Famous quotes containing the words classics of, classics, world and/or literature:
“The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classics did the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.”
—Paul Horgan (b. 1904)
“It seems to me that we do not know nearly enough about ourselves; that we do not often enough wonder if our lives, or some events and times in our lives, may not be analogues or metaphors or echoes of evolvements and happenings going on in other people?—or animals?—even forests or oceans or rocks?—in this world of ours or, even, in worlds or dimensions elsewhere.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)