Why Review the Classics?

Happy belated fourth, everyone! Hope y'all enjoyed some fireworks.
For my first July post, I'm going to begin with an introduction to a series of reviews that I will be doing over the next couple of weeks on books that you may have heard of: the Big Three novels by the Bronte sisters. Yes, there are three of them: Bronte sisters, that is. I didn't know of this fact myself until I stumbled across this gem almost two months ago:



You may wonder, "Why bother reviewing the Bronte sisters? Their books have been out for 200 years! The academics say that they're good, so while some of us will pick up and read them ourselves, most will either read them in school or never pick up a copy cuz they're just too long and boring."
Well I'm reading them just due to that latter group, to which I had belonged after struggling to stay awake while reading Pride and Prejudice (on my own perogative, no less). Only recently has my interest in reading novels by long-dead dudes and dudettes been renewed.

As to why I want to review them, it rings true for all the classics. For one, such works of literature that are considered a part of the classics canon should be put to the test of timelessness every few decades: a masterpiece may still resonate for hundreds, even thousands, of years after it was first written, but that resonance is likely to fade and eventually diminish over time. Very few great novels can last past the hundred-year mark, and fewer every century after that.
Another reason to evaluating classic works of literature decades after they've been declared classics is that times change. What seems great enough to be a classic one century may not be so the next. Just because students have read Homer and Shakespeare in school for over a hundred years doesn't mean that we should continue to study them in a hundred more years. Not least because literature curricula could stand to be more diverse in its perspective. And the presence of racism, classism, and misogyny, though not grounds for dismissal from the canon (especially not), should at least be pointed out. And as we learn more about specific time periods, we can better examine the classics through a historical lens and evaluate how progressive or influential it was in its time. Then we can ultimately decide whether this classic is worth reading by students and academics. (It's sad that anything over 100 years old is almost automatically relegated to the academic sphere, but that is another post.)

Lastly, just because a whole bunch of people say that something is so great it's a masterpiece, doesn't mean it is.

Next post, I will review the eldest, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.