Why I Read Classic Literature
History, Timeless Quality, And The Literary Web
Happy Sunday!!!
Can you believe we only have two more Sundays left this year?
It’s getting cold and I’m enjoying some nice cosy reads. Today I’m reading L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of the Island, the third book in the Anne of Green Gables series. A good old classic.
I really love reading classics, I only started reading them last year but once I started, it soon became my favourite. I know not everyone feels the same, everyone has their preferences. But I have often wondered, why exactly I love classics so much.
I can think of three main reasons.
1. Fusion Of History And Fairy Tales
I’m someone who has always been fascinated with history. And when I was a child, my absolute favourite thing to read was fairy tales. Classic literature, in some sense, has qualities of both.
Classics reflect history, of course, that’s very straightforward. And in being set in worlds that are so very different from the one I live in, they also have an almost mythical quality to them even when there isn’t essentially anything mythical about them. Like Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It depicts the early 1800s Russian society and the Napoleonic wars while remaining completely faithful to reality. But since I’ve never been part of those realities, to me they possess the same fascinating power of mythical worlds.
2. Time-Tested
I can trust them to be good because they’ve stood the test of time. The classics have been around for a long time, hundreds of years in some cases. And books that still remain relevant after so many years, tend to be good.
It does happen that sometimes I read a famous classic and it’s not exactly to my taste, but even in those cases, I can still admit that they are good pieces of literature. Like, Pride and Prejudice. I’m not too fond of romance as a genre, which is why it doesn’t click with me as much. But I still admire the novel for its brilliant structuring. The way Austen introduces conflict, tension, and resolution, and balances between dialogues and narratives, is impeccable.
3. The Web Of Literature
The thing with literature is it’s all like a web, it’s interconnected. One work of literature influences the other. This is why I prefer to read classic literature because they came before modern literature, and give context to better understand modern literature.
Take Romeo and Juliet for example, it has and still continues to inspire innumerable star-crossed lovers’ stories. But even Romeo and Juliet was inspired by stories like Pyramus and Thisbe and Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which Brooke himself is said to have translated from Matteo Bandello’s Italian novella.
Now, I have seen some comments here and there claiming classic literature is ‘superior’ to modern literature. But I don’t necessarily agree. I think classics are important because they represent the past of literature, and knowing and acknowledging the past is absolutely important. But that importance only finds fulfilment when it’s connected to the present and the future. And today’s modern literature will be the classics some hundred years from now. Isn’t that kind of exciting?
What about you? Do you like reading classic literature? Why do you like reading classic literature? Don’t forget to let me know.
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