Talk:Classic book/Archive 1

Additions
I'm gonna go ahead and add John Milton, James Fenimore Cooper, and James Joyce to the list. They're obvious choices. What's the opinion on perhaps adding C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein? Dabarnes 05:41, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Conan Doyle
I added Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the list; surely Sherlock Holmes is a classic? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.163.37.73 (talk) 00:57, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Classical vs. Classic
The article begins by claiming that a "classic" book is one written in Greece or Rome. In fact, I would call such a book "classical," though it may also be a "classic." In other words, Virgil's "Aeneid" is both classical and classic, but George Eliot's "Middlemarch," while a classic, is not classical. I think we need to be much more careful about the definitions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.72.106.122 (talk) 02:54, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

List of classic authors
I've removed the huge list of classic authors from the article. It didn't serve any real purpose, and attracted additions without references. For that matter, none of the authors that were on it had any sources claiming that they were authors of classics.

It is probably appropriate for us to list a few authors of classics, and in particular their books, as examples, but we should only do this when we have sources backing us up. It's not too hard to find a reliable source claiming one book or another as a classic, so it won't be problematic to add some examples when the time comes. First, though, we seriously need to add some references and provide a better description than we presently have. I'll look into this later, but literature isn't quite my subject, so I hope someone more knowledgeable can provide some references. A brief search brings up an article by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve on the subject which may be useful, and seems to be cited by many others.

This article seems like a fairly basic topic that we ought to cover, so I hope we can do something to improve it. --Sopoforic 23:28, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

It would not be at all difficult to come up with sources for a list of classic authors (or classic works of literature, for that matter.) There are, after all, various publishers (Penguin Classics, Oxford World's Classics, Modern Library, Everyman's Library, Wordsworth Classics, Barnes and Noble Classics, etc. etc. etc.) whose entire purview is to publish "Classic Literature". I'd think that any major publisher publishing a book in one of these "classics" imprints would qualify as making it a "classic," for all reasonable purposes. Many of them (Penguin, Oxford, Modern Library, Everyman's) even include introductions by scholars or well-known writers talking about why the books are classics, so it shouldn't be difficult. In particular, books which are published by several of these lines would pretty clearly qualify (for instance, I think most of the works of most of the major English language novelists of the 19th century are published by virtually all of these lines - such works would clearly qualify; so would the most important French and Russian novels of the 19th century. It obviously gets more difficult once we get to works not yet in the public domain, since these will generally only show up in one or two lines (several lines are owned by the same publishing companies, and thus there is some doubling even for these).  At any rate, this is not at all hard to do.  I do think that we ought to do more to clarify the role of publishing houses in the designation of what constitutes "classic literature."  Penguin, for instance, gets to pretty much singlehandedly decide that a book is a classic by putting the book out as a black paperback with a red stripe across the top and a public domain painting on the cover. All the better if Oxford puts the book out as a white paperback with a red stripe across the top and a public domain painting on the cover, and Everyman's or Modern Library puts it out as a handsome hardcover with a picture of the author on the front. Ultimately, it's Penguin and Random House and OUP who decide what is a classic, in English at least. Or, at least, they have a great deal of control over it, and this should be discussed. john k (talk) 15:50, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Age of classics
I'm not sure about this bit:
 * Most "classics" are at least 95 years old

Presumably that relates to US copyright law - there's no real significance to the 95-year figure in Europe, for example. Personally I'm not sure that giving dates is terribly useful - something like "many classic works are now out of copyright" would seem better - but if there's a good reason for retaining the figure, let's hear it. =:) Loganberry 00:42, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * I've attempted to rewrite the article to avoid this. I think it's probably better not to mention specific figures at all, given the variation between various countries' copyright terms. Loganberry 13:10, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I agree —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.248.185.22 (talk) 15:02, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

What exactly is the definition of a classic?
Or is there one? My teacher asked me why The Invisible Man is a Classic. She said I explained why it was a good book, why I liked it, and how the author put meaning into it, not why it was a classic. Well, I did, but I still don't know what a classic is. So... ?

The author must be dead 25 years and the book in the PD. Zginder 12:12, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Does the definition have to be limited to literary works? I would consider various well known religeous texts, like the Bible, the Qur'an and the Tanakh as "classics" (although technically a collection of texts). I'd concede that often these works are studied, rather than read for entertainment value, but they could still be considered classic (and classical). I was also tempted to include works such as the Hindu Vedas, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Epic of Gilgamesh on the list too, but I certainly wouldn't consider them modern classics. This made me think that the definition of a classic is perhaps a text that is still relevant today that is widely important in influencing modern (western?) thinking and culture. Certainly the first three above do fit that description (Bible, Qur'an, Tanakh) but not the latter three. And yes, I would consider the Qur'an and the Tanakh as both world-relevant and western relevant (entertaining the discussion about western canon below). 41.240.234.24 (talk) 11:24, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Article Merge
I think that this article should be merged into the western canon article. Its the best answer that one could give for what defines a novel as a classic. Generally speaking there is no available consensus on how a book becomes a classic. Therefore, this article will always be affected by bias.

Otherwise the article could simply state that a classic book is a book that is popularly believed to be important to or apart of the Western Cannon of literature (which does include some eastern books). I think that is as specific as one can get without filling this article when randomly excerpted opinions. Anyone else agree? 199.248.185.22 (talk) 15:17, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me. Bertport (talk) 16:26, 23 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Note, the above comment was re. the previous versions of the article. A complete rewrite was introduced on 14th June 2010, via a WP:HISTMERGE - see this diff.  Chzz  ► 18:36, 14 June 2010 (UTC)


 * They're not the same thing, though. --189.247.133.63 (talk) 22:35, 26 February 2011 (UTC)


 * I was going to support a merge, but actually this article is more fully developed that Western Canon and as the previous comment, although there is an overlap they are still different concepts. Someone should get rid of the italics in the title though.ProfDEH (talk) 08:56, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Why is the title in italics?
It's not the title of any specific book. --  Jack of Oz   [your turn]  23:13, 10 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I ask the same question in 2013. I don't see any "italics" code in the header, so I don't see how to turn it off. --Tenebrae (talk) 15:17, 22 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I fixed it...not quite sure which fix worked (might have been both working together), but the code was maybe 1)taking the Infobox book parameter and using that to italicize the title or 2)taking the italics around the words classic book in the caption and using that. So I changed the Infobox to the regular Infobox and deleted the italics around the words in the image caption. Shearonink (talk) 15:03, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

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Merging in Great books
I'm merging the page Great books into this page, based on the fact that the two pages cover almost exactly the same material, per WP:CFORK. It appears that "Great book" is just a term that Mortimer Adler uses for classic book, and that classic book is by far the more common term, so that page should be merged into this one. In the merge, I removed a large amount of adulatory material for Mortimer Adler, as well as a lot of material that was just copied from Great Books of the Western World. Any other removed material should probably be on the GBWW page, not this one. I also took the liberty of removing a lot of uncited, but unverifiable and POV-pushing information that did not seem to be much other than WP:SOAPBOX about what the content of university curricula "these days" happens to be. &#32;- car chasm (talk) 00:08, 24 December 2021 (UTC)