Dante beyond influence

Dante beyond influence
Author: Federica Coluzzi
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526152436

Dante beyond influence is the first study to conceptualise and historicise the hermeneutic turn in Dante reception history and Victorian cultural history, charting its development across intellectual realms, agents and forms of readerly and writerly engagement. Unearthing previously unseen manuscript and print evidence, the book conducts a material and book-historical inquiry into the formation and popularisation of the critical and scholarly discourse on Dante through Victorian periodicals, mass-publishing, traditional and Extramural higher education. The book demonstrates that the transformation of Dante from object of amateur interest (dantophilia) to subject of systematic interpretive endeavours (dantismo) reflected paradigmatic changes in Victorian intellectual and socio-cultural history.

How Dante Can Save Your Life

How Dante Can Save Your Life
Author: Rod Dreher
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2015-04-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1941393772

The opening lines of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri launched Rod Dreher on a journey that rescued him from exile and saved his life. Dreher found that the medieval poem offered him a surprisingly practical way of solving modern problems. Following the death of his little sister and the publication of his New York Times bestselling memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Dreher found himself living in the small community of Starhill, Louisiana where he grew up. But instead of the fellowship he hoped to find, he discovered that fault lines within his family had deepened. Dreher spiraled into depression and a stress-related autoimmune disease. Doctors told Dreher that if he didn’t find inner peace, he would destroy his health. Soon after, he came across The Divine Comedy in a bookstore and was enchanted by its first lines, which seemed to describe his own condition. In the months that followed, Dante helped Dreher understand the mistakes and mistaken beliefs that had torn him down and showed him that he had the power to change his life. Dreher knows firsthand the solace and strength that can be found in Dante’s great work, and distills its wisdom for those who are lost in the dark wood of depression, struggling with failure (or success), wrestling with a crisis of faith, alienated from their families or communities, or otherwise enduring the sense of exile that is the human condition. Inspiring, revelatory, and packed with penetrating spiritual, moral, and psychological insights, How Dante Can Save Your Life is a book for people, both religious and secular, who find themselves searching for meaning and healing. Dante told his patron that he wrote his poem to bring readers from misery to happiness. It worked for Rod Dreher. Dante saved Rod Dreher’s life—and in this book, Dreher shows you how Dante can save yours.

The Dante Club

The Dante Club
Author: Matthew Pearl
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2003-02-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1588363104

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Before The Dante Chamber, there was The Dante Club: “an ingenious thriller that . . . brings Dante Alighieri’s Inferno to vivid, even unsettling life.”—The Boston Globe “With intricate plots, classical themes, and erudite characters . . . what’s not to love?”—Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code and Origin Boston, 1865. The literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America’s first translation of The Divine Comedy. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing the infiltration of foreign superstitions to be as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor. But as the members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell’s punishments from Dante’s Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante’s literary future in the New World at stake, the members of the Dante Club must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret. Praise for The Dante Club “Ingenious . . . [Matthew Pearl] keeps this mystery sparkling with erudition.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Not just a page-turner but a beguiling look at the U.S. in an era when elites shaped the course of learning and publishing. With this story of the Dante Club’s own descent into hell, Mr. Pearl’s book will delight the Dante novice and expert alike.”—The Wall Street Journal “[Pearl] ably meshes the . . . literary analysis with a suspenseful plot and in the process humanizes the historical figures. . . . A divine mystery.”—People (Page-turner of the Week) “An erudite and entertaining account of Dante’s violent entrance into the American canon.”—Los Angeles Times “A hell of a first novel . . . The Dante Club delivers in spades. . . . Pearl has crafted a work that maintains interest and drips with nineteenth-century atmospherics.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Dante, Cinema, and Television

Dante, Cinema, and Television
Author: Amilcare A. Iannucci
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780802088277

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the seminal works of western literature. Its impact on modern culture has been enormous, nourishing a plethora of twentieth century authors from Joyce and Borges to Kenzaburo Oe. Although Dante's influence in the literary sphere is well documented, very little has been written on his equally determining role in the evolution of the visual media unique to our times, namely, cinema and television. Dante, Cinema, and Television corrects this oversight. The essays, from a broad range of disciplines, cover the influence of the Divine Comedy from cinema's silent era on through to the era of sound and the advent of television, as well as its impact on specific directors, actors, and episodes, on national/regional cinema and television, and on genres. They also consider the different modes of appropriation by cinema and television. Dante, Cinema, and Television demonstrates the many subtle ways in which Dante's Divine Comedy has been given 'new life' by cinema and television, and underscores the tremendous extent of Dante's staying power in the modern world.

The Unexpected Dante

The Unexpected Dante
Author: Lucia Alma Wolf
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2021-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1684483573

Dante Alighieri’s long poem The Divine Comedy has been one of the foundational texts of European literature for over 700 years. Yet many mysteries still remain about the symbolism of this richly layered literary work, which has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries. The Unexpected Dante brings together five leading scholars who offer fresh perspectives on the meanings and reception of The Divine Comedy. Some investigate Dante’s intentions by exploring the poem’s esoteric allusions to topics ranging from musical instruments to Roman law. Others examine the poem’s long afterlife and reception in the United States, with chapters showcasing new discoveries about Nicolaus de Laurentii’s 1481 edition of Commedia and the creative contemporary adaptations that have relocated Dante’s visions of heaven and hell to urban American settings. This study also includes a guide that showcases selected treasures from the extensive Dante collections at the Library of Congress, illustrating the depth and variety of The Divine Comedy’s global influence. The Unexpected Dante is thus a boon to both Dante scholars and aficionados of this literary masterpiece. Published by Bucknell University Press in association with the Library of Congress. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Visions of Heaven

Visions of Heaven
Author: Martin Kemp
Publisher: Lund Humphries Publishers Limited
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781848224674

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the greatest European writers, whose untrammelled imaginative capacity was matched by a huge base in embracing the science of his era. His texts also paint compelling visual images. In Visions of Heaven, renowned scholar Martin Kemp investigates Dante's supreme vision of divine light and its implications for the visual artists who were the inheritors of Dante's vision. The whole book may be regarded as a new Paragone (comparison), the debate that began in the Renaissance about which of the arts is superior. Dante's ravishing accounts of divine light set painters the severest challenge, which took them centuries to meet. A major theme running through Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly in its third book, the Paradiso, centres on Dante's acts of seeing (conducted according to optical rules with respect to the kind of visual experience that can be accomplished on earth) and the overwhelming of Dante's earthly senses by heavenly light, which does not obey his rules of earthly optics. The repeated blinding of Dante by excessive light sets the tone for artists' portrayal of unseeable brightness.

Freedom Readers

Freedom Readers
Author: Dennis Looney
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780268033866

Introduction. Canonicity, hybridity, freedom ; Sailing with Dante to the new world ; The Dante wax museum on the frontier, 1828 -- Colored Dante. Dante the Protestant. Abolitionists and nationalists, Americans and Italians ; H. Cordelia Ray, William Wells Brown -- Negro Dante. Educating the people: from Cicero to Du Bois ; African American filmmaker at the gates of Hell ; Spencer Williams ; Dante meets Amos 'n' Andy ; Ralph Waldo Ellison's prophetic vernacular muse -- Black Dante. LeRoi Jones, The system of Dante's hell ; A new narrative model ; Amiri Baraka: From Dante's system to the system -- African American Dante. Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills ; Multicolored, Multicultural Terza Rima ; Toni Morrison, The Bluest eye ; Dante Rap -- Poets in exile.

Dante and Islam

Dante and Islam
Author: Jan M. Ziolkowski
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2014-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823263886

Dante put Muhammad in one of the lowest circles of Hell. At the same time, the medieval Christian poet placed several Islamic philosophers much more honorably in Limbo. Furthermore, it has long been suggested that for much of the basic framework of the Divine Comedy Dante was indebted to apocryphal traditions about a “night journey” taken by Muhammad. Dante scholars have increasingly returned to the question of Islam to explore the often surprising encounters among religious traditions that the Middle Ages afforded. This collection of essays works through what was known of the Qur’an and of Islamic philosophy and science in Dante’s day and explores the bases for Dante’s images of Muhammad and Ali. It further compels us to look at key instances of engagement among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

The Dante Chamber

The Dante Chamber
Author: Matthew Pearl
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2018-05-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525558950

Memories, fears, the fog of nightmares... Five years after a series of Dante-inspired killings stunned Boston, a politician is found in a London park with his neck crushed by an enormous stone device etched with a verse from the Divine Comedy. When other shocking deaths erupt across the city, all in the style of the penances Dante memorialized in Purgatory, poet Christina Rossetti fears her missing brother, the artist and writer Dante Gabriel Rossetti, will be the next victim. The unwavering Christina enlists poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes to decipher the literary clues, and together these unlikely investigators unravel the secrets of Dante’s verses to find Gabriel and stop the killings. Racing between the shimmering mansions of the elite and the seedy corners of London’s underworld, they descend further into the mystery. But when the true inspiration behind the gruesome murders is finally revealed, Christina must confront a more profound terror than anyone had imagined. A dazzling tale of intrigue from the writer Library Journal calls “the reigning king of popular literary historical thrillers,” The Dante Chamber is a riveting journey across London and into both the beauty and darkness of Dante. Expertly blending fact and fiction, Pearl gives us a historical mystery like no other that captivates and surprises until the last page.

Dante’s Bones

Dante’s Bones
Author: Guy P. Raffa
Publisher: Belknap Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2020-05-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0674980832

A richly detailed graveyard history of the Florentine poet whose dead body shaped Italy from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the Risorgimento, World War I, and Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. Dante, whose Divine Comedy gave the world its most vividly imagined story of the afterlife, endured an extraordinary afterlife of his own. Exiled in death as in life, the Florentine poet has hardly rested in peace over the centuries. Like a saint’s relics, his bones have been stolen, recovered, reburied, exhumed, examined, and, above all, worshiped. Actors in this graveyard history range from Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo, and Pope Leo X to the Franciscan friar who hid the bones, the stone mason who accidentally discovered them, and the opportunistic sculptor who accomplished what princes, popes, and politicians could not: delivering to Florence a precious relic of the native son it had banished. In Dante’s Bones, Guy Raffa narrates for the first time the complete course of the poet’s hereafter, from his death and burial in Ravenna in 1321 to a computer-generated reconstruction of his face in 2006. Dante’s posthumous adventures are inextricably tied to major historical events in Italy and its relationship to the wider world. Dante grew in stature as the contested portion of his body diminished in size from skeleton to bones, fragments, and finally dust: During the Renaissance, a political and literary hero in Florence; in the nineteenth century, the ancestral father and prophet of Italy; a nationalist symbol under fascism and amid two world wars; and finally the global icon we know today.