Ooooh look whose getting all philosophical!
I think at least part of 'classic' status is directly related to the universality or truth of a book, even if its fictional. To appeal on a near universal scale hints at something that most authors can't do, so when it is done, we all gather round that book and say, 'ah yes, now that one will be a classic.'
Many classics also tried something new, I think. I don't really take classics in context, so I can't give examples. Actually, wait, yes I can:
The Female Quixote. One of those 18th century books that was written around/after Pamela - classic books which embody the changing views of culture and women in those times. With that in mind, perhaps some classics are those which give us a genuine insight to the time in which they were written?
I'm rambling.

I usually think of a classic as something that was written before World War I, but I also use the term to describe something that has had a major impact. For example, I would consider anything by Hemingway to be a classic because of his impact on American literature, even though all of his books were published after World War I.

Echo said:I usually think of a classic as something that was written before World War I, but I also use the term to describe something that has had a major impact. For example, I would consider anything by Hemingway to be a classic because of his impact on American literature, even though all of his books were published after World War I.

RoxiS.C. said:Ooooh look whose getting all philosophical!

It is one of those questions that I cannot answer with a proper statement,
it is more a case of "Name a book, and I'll tell you if it's a classic!"
(and that answers nothing!)

I define a classic by the ongoing devotion to it from readers, by the influence it had
on the thinking of the time, either through content or style.

Can a classic be defined by it's publication date? I'm not sure, Hemingway was
Echo's example, another could be George Orwell, who published Animal Farm
& Nineteen Eighty Four after World War Two.

I'm going to be pondering this one now!

Well, many people, like myself use WWI as the 'cut-point' for classics, because it had such a huge effect on society and the way we see the world around us. Styles changed, in all areas of living. And a 'classic' would have to have the ability to stand the test of time, and WWI is just a nice time period away. If a book was written before it, and is still read and appreciated, then it has stood the test of time. A newer book while it might be equally good, and will have the same duration, hasn't had that yet. We don't know what people will be reading 50 years from now. So naming one of the newer books a classic already is a bit of a gamble.

I think we discussed this whole definition of a classic somewhere earlier. But for example for the Classics Circle, we're using WWI as the cut-off. Just to make it simpler. I personally would also include authors like Hemingway into the classics-group. I guess a term 'modern classic' could be applied to them? To distinguish that while they've been around for a while now, they haven't really 'matured' enough to be 'classics'.

But, do you think that in twenty years or so the WWII will be used as a cut-off point? Or is it really more about the change in the society that makes the WWI such a divider?

I've said it before, here, that World War One makes the key dividing line for me.

It's not just because of the distance of time. There's much more to it than that - and because of those reasons I don't think WWII will become the dividing line.

There are two elements. One is societal, historical. World War One changed the way we understood the world. We moved from a relatively innocent Victorian age, an age of empires and class, basically, into a world where the industrial revolution was pushed into the realm of the industrialisation of war. At the same time, it brought the car and aeroplane leaping forward and is basically the dividing line between a world where communication takes weeks by boat, to one where it takes days. And, also, the Russian Revolution, the arrival of totalitarian communist and fascist states, arrived at the same time.

All of these fundamentally changed the way society worked. World War 2, although more violent and more extreme in the numbers killed (oddly, though, not for Britain, who lost far more men in WWI) did not change the way the world operated in quite the same way - really only the nuclear threat, the threat of total oblivion, fundamentally changed our understanding of the world.

Meanwhile, in literature, cleverness, post-modernism, playing with structure, all arrived pretty quickly after WWI. Joyce and Kafka and Bulgakov and so on started producing books that didn't stick to the traditional idioms and styles. Probably Hemingway, too. The style of writing changed, and anyone trying to write like Austen or Dickens or Hardy was, from then on, only going to be seen as writing a pastiche.

So, unless and until we have another very small number of years that massively change the way society thinks, I think we won't have another sensible definition of classic.

And I think this definition of classic also works in the sense that many people still long for an innocent, pre-industrial age, where the writing wasn't fancy or clever, just structured and straightforward, and pre-WWI largely falls into that form; post-WWi pretty much doesn't.

Oh, absolutely. For me it has to be old enough, in the classic style rather than using any modernist or post-modern idiom or writing style. But it also has to really be part of the canon. There's Victorian dross which is clearly not classic. But I still think almost anything written post-WWI can't be thought of as a classic in the way that, say, Austen or Dickens or Flaubert or Hugo or Tolstoy are.



This post has been edited by Freewheeling Andy: 16 January 2009 - 02:19 PM

Enthusiast said:That's weird! In my taster session for 6th forum English Literature, the teacher grabbed our attention through gothic literature! I found it very interesting indeed, and I'm taking English lit so I'm looking forward to it very much. :mrgreen:

RoxiS.C. said:I've studied several texts in Romantic/Gothic literature, Victorian literature and some 18th Century Literature. I tried those last year and loved them, so this year I'm back for more!