Author : Justin Steinberg
Publisher :
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 15,35 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780268041229
'Accounting for Dante' examines Dante's relation to his contemporary public, an audience that included poets who responded to Dante's early work as well as those who first copied, preserved, and circulated his poetry. The study reveals the importance of professional, urban classes as cultivators of early Italian poetry.
Author : Justin Steinberg
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 30,61 MB
Release : 2013-12-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 022607112X
In Dante and the Limits of the Law, Justin Steinberg offers the first comprehensive study of the legal structure essential to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Steinberg reveals how Dante imagines an afterlife dominated by sophisticated laws, hierarchical jurisdictions, and rationalized punishments and rewards. He makes the compelling case that Dante deliberately exploits this highly structured legal system to explore the phenomenon of exceptions to it, crucially introducing Dante to current debates about literature’s relation to law, exceptionality, and sovereignty. Examining how Dante probes the limits of the law in this juridical otherworld, Steinberg argues that exceptions were vital to the medieval legal order and that Dante’s otherworld represents an ideal “system of exception.” In the real world, Dante saw this system as increasingly threatened by the dual crises of church and empire: the abuses and overreaching of the popes and the absence of an effective Holy Roman Emperor. Steinberg shows that Dante’s imagination of the afterlife seeks to address this gap between the universal validity of Roman law and the lack of a sovereign power to enforce it. Exploring the institutional role of disgrace, the entwined phenomena of judicial discretion and artistic freedom, medieval ideas about privilege and immunity, and the place of judgment in the poem, this cogently argued book brings to life Dante’s sense of justice.
Author : Zygmunt G. Barański
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 29,35 MB
Release : 2019
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1108421296
Accessible and informative account of Dante's great Commedia: its purpose, themes and styles, and its reception over the centuries.
Author : Zygmunt G. Baranski
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
Page : 633 pages
File Size : 49,40 MB
Release : 2022-05-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0268202370
Prominent Dante scholars from the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom contribute original essays to the first critical companion in English to Dante’s “other works.” Rather than speak of Dante’s “minor works,” according to a tradition of Dante scholarship going back at least to the eighteenth century, this volume puts forward the designation “other works” both in light of their enhanced status and as part of a general effort to reaffirm their value as autonomous works. Indeed, had Dante never written the Commedia, he would still be considered the most important writer of the late Middle Ages for the originality and inventiveness of the other works he wrote besides his monumental poem, including the Rime, the Fiore, the Detto d’amore, the Vita nova, the Epistles, the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, the Monarchia, the Egloge, and the Questio de aqua et terra. Each contributor to this volume addresses one of the “other works” by presenting the principal interpretative trends and questions relating to the text, and by focusing on aspects of particular interest. Two essays on the relationship between the “other works” and the issues of philosophy and theology are included. Dante’s “Other Works” will interest Dantisti, medievalists, and literary scholars at every stage of their career. Contributors: Manuele Gragnolati, Christopher Kleinhenz, Zygmunt G. Barański, Claire E. Honess, Simon Gilson, Mirko Tavoni, Paola Nasti, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., David G. Lummus, Luca Bianchi, and Vittorio Montemaggi.
Author : William Franke
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 42,86 MB
Release : 2023-09-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1000937518
This book comprises a searching philosophical meditation on the evolution of the humanities in recent decades, taking Dante studies as an exemplary specimen. The contemporary currents of theory have decisively impacted this field, but Dante also has a strong relationship with theology. The idea that theology, teleology, and logocentric rationalities are simply overcome and swept away by new theoretical approaches proves much more complex as the theory revolution is exposed in its crypto-theological motives and origins. The revolutionary agendas and methodologies of theoretical currents have ushered in all manner of minorities and postcolonial and gender studies. But the exciting adventure they inaugurate shows up in quite a surprising light when brought to focus through the scholarly discipline of Dante studies as a terrain of dispute between traditional philology and postmodern theory. On this terrain, negative theology can play a peculiarly destabilizing, but also a conciliatory, role: it is equally critical of all languages for a theological transcendence to which it nevertheless remains infinitely open.
Author : Nicolò Crisafi
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 40,44 MB
Release : 2022-02-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0192672150
Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the 'Commedia' questions the familiar narrative arc at play in the writings of Dante Alighieri and opens his masterpiece to three alternative models that resist it. Dante's masterplot is the teleological trajectory by which the poet subordinates the past to the authority of a new experience. The book analyses the masterplot's workings in Dante's text and its role in the interpretation of the poem, and it documents its overwhelming success in influencing readings of the Commedia over the centuries. The volume then explores three competing narrative models that resist and counter its monopoly which are enacted by paradoxes, alternative endings and parallel lives, and the future. By focusing on these non-linear modes of storytelling and testing the limits of linear narration, the book questions critical paradigms in the scholarship of the Commedia that favour a single normative master truth, exposes their problematic authoritarian implications, and highlights the manifold poetic, theological, and ethical tensions that are often neglected due to the masterplot's influence. The new picture of a vulnerable author and open-ended text that emerges from this study thus doubles as a metacritical reflection on the state of the field. The book's impassioned argument is that, alongside established notions of his trademark plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante's narrative pluralism can, and should, come to play a key role in contemporary and future readings of the Commedia.
Author : Tristan Kay
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 31,67 MB
Release : 2016-01-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0191068721
Dante's Lyric Redemption offers a re-examination of two strongly interrelated aspects of the poet's work: the role and value he ascribes to earthly love and his relationship to the Romance lyric tradition of his time. It argues that an account of Dante's poetic journey that posits a stark division between earthly and divine love, and between the secular lyric poet and the Christian auctor, does little justice to his highly distinctive and often polemical handling of these categories. The book firstly contextualizes, traces, and accounts for Dante's intriguing commitment to love poetry, from the 'minor works' to the Commedia. It highlights his attempts, especially in his masterpiece, to overcome normative oppositions in formulating a uniquely redemptive vernacular poetics, one oriented towards the eternal while rooted in his affective, and indeed erotic, past. It then examines how this matter is at stake in Dante's treatment of three important lyric predecessors: Guittone d'Arezzo, Arnaut Daniel, and Folco of Marseilles. Through a detailed reading of Dante's engagement with these poets, the book illuminates his careful departure from a dualistic model of love and conversion and shows his erotic commitment to be at the heart of his claims to pre-eminence as a vernacular author.
Author : Manuele Gragnolati
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 778 pages
File Size : 36,20 MB
Release : 2021
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0198820747
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.
Author : Zygmunt G. Baranski
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 25,63 MB
Release : 2023-12-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0268207380
This original volume proposes a novel way of reading Dante’s Vita nova, exemplified in a rich diversity of scholarly approaches to the text. This groundbreaking volume represents the fruit of a two-year-long series of international seminars aimed at developing a fresh way of reading Dante’s Vita nova. By analyzing each of its forty-two chapters individually, focus is concentrated on the Vita nova in its textual and historical context rather than on its relationship to the Divine Comedy. This decoupling has freed the contributors to draw attention to various important literary features of the text, including its rich and complex polysemy, as well as its structural fluidity. The volume likewise offers insights into Dante’s social environment, his relationships with other poets, and Dante’s evolving vision of his poetry’s scope. Using a variety of critical methodologies and hermeneutical approaches, this volume offers scholars an opportunity to reread the Vita nova in a renewed context and from a diversity of literary, cultural, and ideological perspectives. Contributors: Zygmunt G. Barański, Heather Webb, Claire E. Honess, Brian F. Richardson, Ruth Chester, Federica Pich, Matthew Treherne, Catherine Keen, Jennifer Rushworth, Daragh O’Connell, Sophie V. Fuller, Giulia Gaimari, Emily Kate Price, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, Francesca Southerden, Rebecca Bowen, Nicolò Crisafi, Lachlan Hughes, Franco Costantini, David Bowe, Tristan Kay, Filippo Gianferrari, Simon Gilson, Rebekah Locke, Luca Lombardo, Peter Dent, George Ferzoco, Paola Nasti, Marco Grimaldi, David G. Lummus, Helena Phillips-Robins, Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė, Alessia Carrai, Ryan Pepin, Valentina Mele, Katherine Powlesland, Federica Coluzzi, K. P. Clarke, Nicolò Maldina, Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Chiara Sbordoni, Lorenzo Dell’Oso, and Anne C. Leone.
Author : Kara Gaston
Publisher :
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 40,36 MB
Release : 2020
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 019885286X
This book tracks how concepts of reading developed within Italian texts (including Dante's Vita nova, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Petrarch's Seniles) impress themselves upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales.
