A collection of Calvino's essays and lectures, spanning theoretical pieces on cybernetics, structuralism, and "levels of reality" in fiction alongside close readings of specific classics — the Odyssey, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma, Manzoni's The Betrothed, Balzac's city fiction, Voltaire's Candide, and Cyrano de Bergerac's lunar fantasy — plus shorter pieces on Fourier, Marianne Moore, Pliny, and Roland Barthes.
Books mentioned in The Uses of Literature (45)
The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni: “Calvino devotes a full essay ("Manzoni's The Betrothed: The Novel of Ratios of Power") to analyzing the novel's characters and power structures”
Candide by Voltaire: “Essay "Candide: An Essay in Velocity," written as preface to an Italian edition illustrated by Paul Klee”
Natural History by Pliny the Elder: “Preface to an Italian translation; Calvino discusses Pliny's prose style and his survey of the animal world in Book VIII”
Ferragus by Honoré de Balzac: “Introduction to an Italian translation of Balzac's Ferragus discussed in "The City as Protagonist in Balzac"”
Metamorphoses by Ovid: Discussed at length in "Ovid and Universal Contiguity" as aiming to represent all that is worth telling of what has been passed down by literature
Capital by Karl Marx: Cited as an example of books of revolutionary propaedeutics, from Marx's Capital to the manuals on guerrilla warfare
Orlando Innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo: “Noted as the unfinished poem that Orlando Furioso presents itself as continuing”
Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky: “If I read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons or Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, I cannot help thinking how the characters have continued to be reincarnated”
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev: “Paired with Dostoyevsky's The Possessed in the same passage about recurring character types”
The Nose by Nikolai Gogol: “Grouped with Alice in Wonderland and Kafka's Metamorphoses as fantasy that unravels a logic with rules”
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: Cited in the same passage as an example of fantasy readers' pleasure in unraveling internal logic
The Fables of La Fontaine by Jean de La Fontaine: “Calvino mentions not knowing Marianne Moore's translation of the Fables but suspecting it would be illuminating”
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal: “Subject of the essay "Guide to The Charterhouse of Parma for the Use of New Readers"”
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: Discussed repeatedly, including as a philosophical novel and via the device of the fictional Arab chronicler Cid Hamet Benengeli
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: Discussed as a work in which Flaubert excludes the language and visions of his other novels
The Odyssey by Homer: “Subject of the essay "Within the Odyssey," discussing the narrator and the poem's mythic layers”
Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto: “Subject of "The Structure of Orlando Furioso," analyzed at length including the enchanted-palace episode with Atlante and Astolfo”
A Thousand and One Nights: Discussed as the framework tale of Shahryar and Scheherazade, exemplifying nested storytelling
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: “Called a philosophical novel without knowing it, and discussed as the basis for Michel Tournier's Vendredi”
Lucien Leuwen by Stendhal: “Calvino quotes Stendhal's marginal note in the manuscript about the best sporting dog and the hunter's gun”
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino: Referenced as Calvino's own earlier novel, its protagonist a kind of Don Quixote of the Philosophy of the Enlightenment
Italian Chronicles by Stendhal: “Noted as where Stendhal recounted the Renaissance story he researched in libraries”
La Duchesse de Langeais by Honoré de Balzac: “Its second chapter is described as providing a sociological study of the aristocracy of the Faubourg Saint-Germain”
La Fille aux yeux d'or by Honoré de Balzac: Mentioned in the same passage as La Duchesse de Langeais as part of the same story cycle
Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost: Discussed alongside La Nouvelle Héloïse as eighteenth-century novels criticized in a passage Calvino quotes
La Nouvelle Héloïse by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Cited alongside Manon Lescaut as an eighteenth-century novel discussed in the same critical passage
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: “Analyzed as drawn from a supernovel that contains all possible variants of the life story of Edmond Dantès”
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli: “Balzac is quoted as having said The Charterhouse of Parma was like The Prince of a new Machiavelli”
Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye: “Subject of the essay "Literature as Projection of Desire," which reviews and responds to Frye's book at length”
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: Cited as the masterpiece in which Dickens handles the reappearance of a convict father
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens: Mentioned in discussing Dickens's illustrators, noting Cruikshank's falling-out with Dickens came after this book
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: Cited as an example of autobiography as exploration of origins, where the narrator dwells on his antecedents
Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno: “Identified as the original text upon which this criticism is based, published some decades earlier”
Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare: Discussed via Cleopatra's imagining of her fate before her suicide in the last act
La Comédie humaine by Honoré de Balzac: Referenced as the cycle across whose volumes the figure of Vautrin recurs in various guises
La Tentation de Saint Antoine by Gustave Flaubert: “Contrasted with Madame Bovary as representing a different, excluded side of Flaubert's writing”
Salammbô by Gustave Flaubert: Cited in the same passage as La Tentation de Saint Antoine as part of Flaubert's excluded other voice
S/Z by Roland Barthes: Cited by Calvino ("Roland Barthes, S/Z") in discussing Barthes's structuralist analysis
Les Mots et les choses by Michel Foucault: “Compared to Manzoni's description of Don Ferrante's library as a catalogue of Renaissance letters”
Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique by Michel Tournier: Discussed as a reworking of Robinson Crusoe dense with references to the human sciences, which had come out in France a few months earlier
Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes by Raymond Queneau: “Described as not so much a book as the rudimentary model of a machine for making sonnets, each one different from the last”
La Chambre claire by Roland Barthes: “Calvino describes reading Barthes's last book a few weeks before his death, struck by its pages on being photographed”
Introduction à la littérature fantastique by Tzvetan Todorov: Cited as the book whose publication prompted the symposium contribution "Definitions of Territories: Fantasy"
Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso: “Noted as bandied about in convivial disputes in Don Rodrigo's house as a code of chivalric rules”