- We have to acknowledge that our classics are problematic
and that there are aspects of them
that we will disagree with now,
that they are artifacts of their moment
and that in some ways they are evidence
of the way that things have changed,
as well as evidence of the things
that have endured within them.
So I think everybody has different definitions of a classic.
So for some people, a classic will be perhaps
the books that they were taught at school.
Some people might just think of classics as old books
because they have lasted a long time
and we're still talking about them today.
Some people might think of a classic
as something that does something absolutely new
and different to anything else because it breaks boundaries.
People might think a book is a classic
because it seems to show something
that's particularly true to them,
so that classics are classics
because they expose true things about human psychology,
because they speak to things that are universal
about the human condition.
Often, our expectations
about what a classic book should be like
are colored by expectations of other things
that we have already read
that we have been told are classics.
For example, you might think about a film director
who's a big name, someone like Steven Spielberg.
We know that his films are classics
because we've been told that they are.
The same thing happens with books,
that once a certain type of book
is established as a classic,
things that are a bit like it
also seem to have more value in that way.
And so one of the ways
in which this idea of the classic was established
in the early 19th century
is through a publishing initiative
called Publishers' Series.
So publishers would print books
that were either from their backlist
or maybe they could get hold of cheaply
and market them as classics.
And that's really one of the first occasions where this idea
that the modern novel could also be a classic comes from
and this idea that if you buy one, you'll collect them all
and this will give you a library of the classics.
One thing that's perhaps quite interesting
about our notions of what genres
or what types of literature are classic
is that those have changed across time.
I think contemporary readers
would think of classic literature as novels.
So novels like "War and Peace", novels like "Moby Dick",
but the novel itself is a relatively new literary form.
That's where the term comes from.
So novel, something that's new.
So it merges in the early to mid 18th century
and it's actually seen as something
that's potentially quite dangerous for people to be reading,
particularly women to be reading,
because it offers access
to often kind of forbidden love stories,
cross-class romances and intensity of emotion.
And the idea is if women are reading
these things alone and privately,
that this kind of secret emotional experience
might be morally corrupting.
Before that, if you ask people what the classics were,
they actually possibly would've told you
kind of Greek or Latin epic,
but they certainly wouldn't have reached
for novels as classic forms.
Whereas nowadays, I think most people
would think about fiction.
One of the tensions in classic literature
is whether books are classics because they offer us access
into and perhaps a snapshot of a particular moment in time.
So does a book become a classic if, for example,
it is the best evocation of early 20th century life,
or is a book a classic because it offers us access
to aspects of the universal human condition?
So we could think about this perhaps
in relation to "War and Peace".
One of the things that "War and Peace"
is kind of celebrated for, is known for,
is its kind of particular evocations
of Napoleon's Russian campaign.
This idea that it seems to kind of encapsulate
this historical moment for us
and give us access to that particular point in history.
But at the same time,
another reason why we value "War and Peace"
is that it kind of points to larger questions
that we've been asking across time.
You know, what does it mean to live a good life?
How do you know when you are in love?
What does love look like?
What kind of things give a person purpose?
And I think in some ways
that kind of lasting relevance or universality
is something that we think about
as being important in classic literature.
Classics are books that are deemed to have literary value,
but obviously, our ideas about the kinds of people
who can produce works of literary value
have changed over time,
that ideas that we have about the kinds of books
that are worth preserving,
that are worth passing on, have changed over time.
Certainly in the 19th century
and I think, really, even into the 20th century,
we might have had this stereotype
of the author as a man, as a white man,
possibly a man who's of a higher social class.
Those are the people whose opinions, whose ideas we value.
Those are the peoples whose books we're going to preserve,
which has meant that really the process
of recovering books that we now think of as classics
that were written by women, by people of color,
has often had to happen later.
I generally think most readers are aware
that if you're reading books from the past,
you'll encounter ideas that have changed.
And actually in some ways,
reflecting on classics of the past
is part of the process of changing ideas.
I hope that we've already in the 21st century
opened this idea that lots of different types of people
can become authors.
Lots of different types of people
have things of value to say,
can produce works of kind of great artistic merit,
which is not to say that there aren't still inequalities
in the publishing industry.
There are, and I think there've been important initiatives
to kind of draw attention to it,
but it's more a sense of looking back
to the past, I think, that's important
and realizing that the lives that people lived
in the past were more diverse, were more varied,
that there were more voices speaking
than perhaps are currently acknowledged.
Often, our sense of what our past was
determines our sense of who we are now.
So I think that the bigger
and more diverse our sense of the past, the better.
(soft music)