Reading If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

Calvino is a writer of many works with various artistic techniques. His early writings are known as neo-realism works. The Path to the Nest of Spiders and the collection of short stories Adam, One Afternoon, and Other Stories are his representative works. In his The Path to the Nest of Spiders , Calvino gives a survey of the surrounding grown-ups and world from a child's perspective. From 1950s on, Calvino converted to allegory and fancy works. In this period of time, Our Ancestors is his main achievement, which consists of The Cloven Viscount , The Baron in the Trees and The Nonexistent Knight. His later works are also very rich. Cosmicomics is full of great imagination. In this period, his most successful works include The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, which represent the realistic environment and spiritual characteristics of people in a post-modern society from different angles. The most attractive one is If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, and it is regarded as a typical post-modernism novel. This novel caused a great sensation immediately after its publication. Peculia as it consists of a main story and ten small stories with different style and contents. The main story focuses on the boredom of everyday life while small stories represent different sufferings in special conditions, which emphasizes people's spiritual state. As to the reseaches on If on a Winter's Night a Traveller ,the review is as follows: some researches concentrate on narrative techniques of the novel; some focus on the application of the metafiction, thinking this novel as one to represent the relationship between the readers, the writer and the context; some hold that this novel aims at mocking the lucrative commercial society;some think this novel represent the writer's consciousness of the death; some think this novel is identical to The Arabian Nights in the aspect of the structure model and concentrate on the structure characteristic of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller,thinking that it is due to the superfluous usage of repetition and replication by Calvino. On the basis of present researches ,The thesis adopts the way of comprehensive research. and had my own analysis. First, Chapter One discusses the content and thematic meaning of this novel; Chapter Two discusses the application of the principle of equivalence; Chapter Three analyzes the characters in this novel and their relationships; Chapter Four analyzes the structure of this novel; Chapter Five presents that there are complicated communication and dialogues between the writer, reader and the context.