Author: Albert Russell Ascoli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139470701
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri – minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring experimental poet – into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon. The text offers a comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his maturity, Monarchy and the Divine Comedy. Ascoli reveals how Dante anticipates modern notions of personalized, creative authorship and the phenomenon of 'Renaissance self-fashioning'. Unusually, the book examines Dante's career as a whole offering an important point of access not only to the Dantean oeuvre, but also to the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.
Dante and the Making of a Modern Author
Author: Albert Russell Ascoli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139470701
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri – minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring experimental poet – into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon. The text offers a comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his maturity, Monarchy and the Divine Comedy. Ascoli reveals how Dante anticipates modern notions of personalized, creative authorship and the phenomenon of 'Renaissance self-fashioning'. Unusually, the book examines Dante's career as a whole offering an important point of access not only to the Dantean oeuvre, but also to the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139470701
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri – minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring experimental poet – into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon. The text offers a comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his maturity, Monarchy and the Divine Comedy. Ascoli reveals how Dante anticipates modern notions of personalized, creative authorship and the phenomenon of 'Renaissance self-fashioning'. Unusually, the book examines Dante's career as a whole offering an important point of access not only to the Dantean oeuvre, but also to the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.
Dante’s Bones
Author: Guy P. Raffa
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674980832
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674980832
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
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.
Dante
Author: Robert Hollander
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300084943
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Book Description
The Divine Comedy, completed around 1320, is a supreme work of the imagination None of Dante's other works, nor even all of his other works taken together, can rival the Comedy. How did the Florentine exile come to create this masterpiece? What steps in his development can explain the making of this extraordinary poem? In this book, a preeminent Dante scholar turns to the poet's body of works - the only real biography of Dante that we have - to illuminate these questions. Through an exposition of Dante's other writings, Robert Hollander provides a concise intellectual biography of the writer whom many consider the greatest narrative poet of the modern era. Hollander writes for those who have already encountered the Comedy, suggesting to these readers how Dante's other works relate to the great poem and inviting them to reread the Comedy with new interest and understanding.
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300084943
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Book Description
The Divine Comedy, completed around 1320, is a supreme work of the imagination None of Dante's other works, nor even all of his other works taken together, can rival the Comedy. How did the Florentine exile come to create this masterpiece? What steps in his development can explain the making of this extraordinary poem? In this book, a preeminent Dante scholar turns to the poet's body of works - the only real biography of Dante that we have - to illuminate these questions. Through an exposition of Dante's other writings, Robert Hollander provides a concise intellectual biography of the writer whom many consider the greatest narrative poet of the modern era. Hollander writes for those who have already encountered the Comedy, suggesting to these readers how Dante's other works relate to the great poem and inviting them to reread the Comedy with new interest and understanding.
Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture
Author: Teodolinda Barolini
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823227057
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 496
Book Description
In this book, Teodolinda Barolini explores the sources of Italian literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its “three crowns”: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Barolini views the origins of Italian literary culture through four prisms: the ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the structural/formal, and the social. The essays in the first section treat the ideology of love and desire from the early lyric tradition to the Inferno and its antecedents in philosophy and theology. In the second, Barolini focuses on Dante as heir to both the Christian visionary and the classical pagan traditions (with emphasis on Vergil and Ovid). The essays in the third part analyze the narrative character of Dante’s Vita nuova, Petrarch’s lyric sequence, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. Barolini also looks at the cultural implications of the editorial history of Dante’s rime and at what sparso versus organico spells in the Italian imaginary. In the section on gender, she argues that the didactic texts intended for women’s use and instruction, as explored by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio—but not by Petrarch—were more progressive than the courtly style for which the Italian tradition is celebrated. Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in “Dante and the Lyric Past” to Petrarch’s regressive stance on gender in “Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature”—and encompassing, among others, Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d’Arezzo—these sixteen essays by one of our leading critics frame the literary culture of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways that will prove useful and instructive to students and scholars alike.
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823227057
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 496
Book Description
In this book, Teodolinda Barolini explores the sources of Italian literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its “three crowns”: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Barolini views the origins of Italian literary culture through four prisms: the ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the structural/formal, and the social. The essays in the first section treat the ideology of love and desire from the early lyric tradition to the Inferno and its antecedents in philosophy and theology. In the second, Barolini focuses on Dante as heir to both the Christian visionary and the classical pagan traditions (with emphasis on Vergil and Ovid). The essays in the third part analyze the narrative character of Dante’s Vita nuova, Petrarch’s lyric sequence, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. Barolini also looks at the cultural implications of the editorial history of Dante’s rime and at what sparso versus organico spells in the Italian imaginary. In the section on gender, she argues that the didactic texts intended for women’s use and instruction, as explored by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio—but not by Petrarch—were more progressive than the courtly style for which the Italian tradition is celebrated. Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in “Dante and the Lyric Past” to Petrarch’s regressive stance on gender in “Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature”—and encompassing, among others, Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d’Arezzo—these sixteen essays by one of our leading critics frame the literary culture of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways that will prove useful and instructive to students and scholars alike.
Vernacular Translation in Dante's Italy
Author: Alison Cornish
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139495380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287
Book Description
Translation and commentary are often associated with institutions and patronage; but in Italy around the time of Dante, widespread vernacular translation was mostly on the spontaneous initiative of individuals. While Dante is usually the starting point for histories of vernacular translation in Europe, this book demonstrates that The Divine Comedy places itself in opposition to a vast vernacular literature already in circulation among its readers. Alison Cornish explores the anxiety of vernacularization as expressed by translators and contemporary authors, the prevalence of translation in religious experience, the role of scribal mediation, the influence of the Italian reception of French literature on that literature, and how translating into the vernacular became a project of nation-building only after its virtual demise during the Humanist period. Vernacular translation was a phenomenon with which all authors in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe - from Brunetto Latini to Giovanni Boccaccio - had to contend.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139495380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287
Book Description
Translation and commentary are often associated with institutions and patronage; but in Italy around the time of Dante, widespread vernacular translation was mostly on the spontaneous initiative of individuals. While Dante is usually the starting point for histories of vernacular translation in Europe, this book demonstrates that The Divine Comedy places itself in opposition to a vast vernacular literature already in circulation among its readers. Alison Cornish explores the anxiety of vernacularization as expressed by translators and contemporary authors, the prevalence of translation in religious experience, the role of scribal mediation, the influence of the Italian reception of French literature on that literature, and how translating into the vernacular became a project of nation-building only after its virtual demise during the Humanist period. Vernacular translation was a phenomenon with which all authors in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe - from Brunetto Latini to Giovanni Boccaccio - had to contend.
Joyce's Dante
Author: James Robinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316739139
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
Joyce's engagement with Dante is a crucial component of all of his work. This title reconsiders the responses to Dante in Joyce's work from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Finnegans Wake. It presents that encounter as an historically complex and contextually determined interaction reflecting the contested development of Dante's reputation, readership and textuality throughout the nineteenth century. This process produced a 'Dante with a difference', a uniquely creative and unorthodox construction of the poet which informed Joyce's lifelong engagement with such works as the Vita Nuova and the Commedia. Tracing the movement through Joyce's writing on exile as a mode of alienation and charting his growing interest in ideas of community, Joyce's Dante shows how awareness of his changing reading of Dante can alter our understanding of one of the Irish writer's lasting thematic preoccupations.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316739139
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
Joyce's engagement with Dante is a crucial component of all of his work. This title reconsiders the responses to Dante in Joyce's work from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Finnegans Wake. It presents that encounter as an historically complex and contextually determined interaction reflecting the contested development of Dante's reputation, readership and textuality throughout the nineteenth century. This process produced a 'Dante with a difference', a uniquely creative and unorthodox construction of the poet which informed Joyce's lifelong engagement with such works as the Vita Nuova and the Commedia. Tracing the movement through Joyce's writing on exile as a mode of alienation and charting his growing interest in ideas of community, Joyce's Dante shows how awareness of his changing reading of Dante can alter our understanding of one of the Irish writer's lasting thematic preoccupations.
Depicting Dante in Anglo-Italian Literary and Visual Arts
Author: Christoph Lehner
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443891819
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
In the course of 750 years, Dante Alighieri has been made into a universally important icon deeply engrained in the world’s cultural memory. This book examines key stages of Dante’s appropriation in Western cultural history by exploring the intermedial relationship between Dante’s Divina Commedia, the tradition of his iconography, and selected historical, literary and artistic responses from British artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. The images and iconographies created out of Dantean appropriations almost always centre around the triad of allegory, authority and authenticity. These three important aspects of revisiting Dante are found in the Dantean image fostered in Florence in the 14th and 15th centuries and feature prominently in the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, T. S. Eliot and Tom Phillips. Their appropriation of Dante represents landmarks in the productive reception of the Florentine, and is invariably linked to a tradition of Dante studies established in Britain during the middle of the 19th century. For Dante Gabriel Rossetti the Florentine provides a model for Victorian Dantean self-fashioning and becomes an allegory of authenticity and morality. For T. S. Eliot, Dante represents the voice of literary authority in Modernist poetry and serves as the allegory of a visionary European author. For Tom Phillips, the engagement with Dante and his text represents an intertextual and intermedial endeavour, which provides him with a rich cultural tapestry of art, thought and ideas on the Western world. The main focus of this study, therefore, is on how Dante’s image was fixed in the first 200 years of his appropriation in Florence, how fruitfully the Dantean images and his text have been taken up and used for creative and intellectual production in Britain over the course of the past centuries, and what moral, literary, or political messages they continue to convey.
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443891819
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
In the course of 750 years, Dante Alighieri has been made into a universally important icon deeply engrained in the world’s cultural memory. This book examines key stages of Dante’s appropriation in Western cultural history by exploring the intermedial relationship between Dante’s Divina Commedia, the tradition of his iconography, and selected historical, literary and artistic responses from British artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. The images and iconographies created out of Dantean appropriations almost always centre around the triad of allegory, authority and authenticity. These three important aspects of revisiting Dante are found in the Dantean image fostered in Florence in the 14th and 15th centuries and feature prominently in the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, T. S. Eliot and Tom Phillips. Their appropriation of Dante represents landmarks in the productive reception of the Florentine, and is invariably linked to a tradition of Dante studies established in Britain during the middle of the 19th century. For Dante Gabriel Rossetti the Florentine provides a model for Victorian Dantean self-fashioning and becomes an allegory of authenticity and morality. For T. S. Eliot, Dante represents the voice of literary authority in Modernist poetry and serves as the allegory of a visionary European author. For Tom Phillips, the engagement with Dante and his text represents an intertextual and intermedial endeavour, which provides him with a rich cultural tapestry of art, thought and ideas on the Western world. The main focus of this study, therefore, is on how Dante’s image was fixed in the first 200 years of his appropriation in Florence, how fruitfully the Dantean images and his text have been taken up and used for creative and intellectual production in Britain over the course of the past centuries, and what moral, literary, or political messages they continue to convey.
Perspectives on «Dante Politico»
Author: Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110790890
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
This book argues that political concerns, inseparable from Dante’s biography, permeate his entire corpus, emerging at the intersection of the multiple fields of knowledge he explores, from the liberal arts to law, philosophy, and theology. It also shows that Dante, by elucidating the natural integration of the humanities with the sciences, continues to be a source of provocative insights and inspirations on how to be political beings today. Preceded by an introductory chapter focused on politics and education, the essays collected in the volume offer a range of close textual and contextual readings of Dante’s life and works grouped in four parts: 1. The Self and History, 2. Visions of the World: Cosmology and Utopia, 3. From the Language of Politics to the Language of Theology, 4. Instances of Political Reception in Asia and South America. The different disciplinary angles adopted by the contributors include history, economics, jurisprudence, linguistics, ethics, metaphysics, theology, cosmology, social thought, ecology, education, and the performing and visual arts. The collection addresses a specialized audience of Dante scholars, medievalists, historians, political philosophers and scientists, reception scholars, and legal and cultural historians.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110790890
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
This book argues that political concerns, inseparable from Dante’s biography, permeate his entire corpus, emerging at the intersection of the multiple fields of knowledge he explores, from the liberal arts to law, philosophy, and theology. It also shows that Dante, by elucidating the natural integration of the humanities with the sciences, continues to be a source of provocative insights and inspirations on how to be political beings today. Preceded by an introductory chapter focused on politics and education, the essays collected in the volume offer a range of close textual and contextual readings of Dante’s life and works grouped in four parts: 1. The Self and History, 2. Visions of the World: Cosmology and Utopia, 3. From the Language of Politics to the Language of Theology, 4. Instances of Political Reception in Asia and South America. The different disciplinary angles adopted by the contributors include history, economics, jurisprudence, linguistics, ethics, metaphysics, theology, cosmology, social thought, ecology, education, and the performing and visual arts. The collection addresses a specialized audience of Dante scholars, medievalists, historians, political philosophers and scientists, reception scholars, and legal and cultural historians.
Divine Providence: A History
Author: Brenda Deen Schildgen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441131388
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Holding divine intervention responsible for political and military success and failure has a long history in western thought. This book explores the idea of providential history as an organizing principle for understanding the divine purpose for humans in texts that may be literary, historical, philosophical, and theological. Providential History shows that, with Virgil and the Bible as authoritative precursors to late antique views on history, the two most important political thinkers of the late antique Christian world, Orosius and Augustine, produced the theories of Christian politics and history that were carried over into the first and second millennium of Christianity. Likewise, their understanding of how the history of the late Roman Empire connects to God's plan for humankind became the background for understanding Dante's own positions in the Monarchia and the Commedia. Brenda Deen Schildgen examines Dante's engagement with these authoritative sources, whether in biblical, ancient Roman writers, or the specific legacy of Orosius and Augustine.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441131388
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Holding divine intervention responsible for political and military success and failure has a long history in western thought. This book explores the idea of providential history as an organizing principle for understanding the divine purpose for humans in texts that may be literary, historical, philosophical, and theological. Providential History shows that, with Virgil and the Bible as authoritative precursors to late antique views on history, the two most important political thinkers of the late antique Christian world, Orosius and Augustine, produced the theories of Christian politics and history that were carried over into the first and second millennium of Christianity. Likewise, their understanding of how the history of the late Roman Empire connects to God's plan for humankind became the background for understanding Dante's own positions in the Monarchia and the Commedia. Brenda Deen Schildgen examines Dante's engagement with these authoritative sources, whether in biblical, ancient Roman writers, or the specific legacy of Orosius and Augustine.
The Dante Club
Author: Matthew Pearl
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588363104
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
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
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588363104
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
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