Introduction

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) was unquestionably one of the most prominent and influential twentieth-century Italian writers, both at national and international levels. The year 2023 marks the centenary of his birth, a fitting moment to reassess his literary legacy, and to put forward new critical perspectives on his work, particularly by intercepting the emerging interest from a younger generation of scholars who are placing Calvino under novel critical and theoretical light. Given his self-exegetical effort, which funnelled and constrained his critical reception and discussion, and his role as a gate-keeper of a specific idea of literature that has maintained an authoritative position for decades, Calvino has held a contested centrality in the context of the Italian Novecento, reaching the position of an instant ‘classic’ when still alive. This has contributed to his success but also produced forms of militant ‘rejection’ within the Italian critical field, particularly in relation to the socalled ‘post-modern’, de-politicised phase of his production. However, in spite of any prescriptive ideological positioning, or of historically sensitive attempts at (de)canonisation, it is indubitable that Calvino represents a possibility (or a potentiality) for literature in one of its most exemplary and original forms in the context of twentieth-century writing. Re-discussing Calvino in the present also presupposes the kind of gesture towards the future that informed his last book, Lezioni americane. Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio, as an attempt to discuss the function of literature and its tradition in respect to the epistemic and cultural challenges in the contemporary context. With his phenomenological, non-Cartesian posture towards reality, for Calvino, literature is the site where one can experiment with, and juxtapose, different narratives and modes of structuring our understanding of reality, with science being eminently important in providing new world-views and myths. As a result, the readings included in this special issue are in conversation with the contemporary and with some of the salient issues that have emerged within literary criticism in recent years at the international level, widening critical parameters towards programmatic interdisciplinary work, as the outstanding focality emerging in the critical approaches to Calvino’s oeuvre at the international level. This informed the symposium held in Cambridge in May 2021 from which this special issue emerged. In anticipation of the Centenary celebratory event, the guest editors, in collaboration with Guido Furci from the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, set up an international conference, titled Italo Calvino: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives. More established scholars and a new generation of young researchers were invited to engage in a dialogue on new critical readings of Calvino’s work through interdisciplinary theoretical approaches. The critical and theoretical tools offered by contemporary science and technology,