Dante’s Testaments

Dante’s Testaments
Author: Peter S. Hawkins
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804737012

Exploring Dante's reading and how he transformed what he found, this book argues that the independence and strength of Dante's poetic stance stems from deep and sustained experience of Christian scriptures.

The Oxford Handbook of Dante

The Oxford Handbook of Dante
Author: Manuele Gragnolati
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 752
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192552597

The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante's formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. The volume is divided into seven sections: 'Texts and Textuality'; 'Dialogues'; 'Transforming Knowledge'; Space(s) and Places'; 'A Passionate Selfhood'; 'A Non-linear Dante'; and 'Nachleben'. It seeks to challenge the Commedia-centric approach (the conviction that notwithstanding its many contradictions, Dante's works move towards the great reservoir of poetry and ideas that is the Commedia), in order to bring to light a non-teleological way in which these works relate amongst themselves. Plurality and the openness of interpretation appear as Dante's very mark, coexisting with the attempt to create an all-encompassing mastership. The Handbook suggests what is exciting about Dante now and indicate where Dante scholarship is going, or can go, in a global context.

Dante and the Practice of Humility

Dante and the Practice of Humility
Author: Rachel K. Teubner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2023-07-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009315366

In this book, Rachel Teubner offers an exploration of humility in Dante's Divine Comedy, arguing that the poem is an ascetical exercise concerned with training its author gradually in the practice of humility, rather than being a reflection of authorial hubris. A contribution to recent scholarship that considers the poem to be a work of self-examination, her volume investigates its scriptural, literary, and liturgical sources, also offering fresh feminist perspectives on its theological challenges. Teubner demonstrates how the poetry of the Comedy is theologically significant, focusing especially on the poem's definition of humility as ethically and artistically meaningful. Interrogating the text canto by canto, she also reveals how contemporary tools of literary analysis can offer new insights into its meaning. Undergraduate and novice readers will benefit from this companion, just as theologians and scholars of medieval religion will be introduced to a growing body of scholarship exploring Dante's religious thought.

The Poetry of Allusion

The Poetry of Allusion
Author: Rachel Jacoff
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1991
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780804718608

A Stanford University Press classic.

The Poetry of Dante's Paradiso

The Poetry of Dante's Paradiso
Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-03-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030656284

This book argues that Paradiso – Dante’s vision of Heaven – is not simply affirmative. It posits that Paradiso compensates for disappointment rather than fulfils hopes, and where it moves into joy and vision, this also rationalises the experience of exile and the failure of all Dante’s political hopes. The book highlights and addresses a fundamental problem in reading Dante: the assumption that he writes as a Catholic Christian, which can be off-putting and induces an overly theological and partisan reading in some commentary. Accordingly, the study argues that Dante must be read now in a post-Christian modernity. It discusses Dante's Christianity fully, and takes its details as a source of wonder and beauty which need communicating to a modern reader. Yet, the study also argues that we must read for the alterity of Dante’s world from ours.