Author: Erich Auerbach
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590172193
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of world’s greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of his Divine Comedy, that the secular world of the modern novel first took imaginative form. Auerbach’s study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement to Mimesis, his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante’s work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redefined notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity. CONTENTS I. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in Literature II. Dante's Early Poetry III. The Subject of the "Comedy" IV. The Structure of the "Comedy" V. The Presentation VI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of Reality Notes Index
Author: Dorothy L. Sayers
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1597524913
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
Introducing the Dante Papers Trilogy: Introductory Papers on Dante Further Papers on Dante The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement This introductory volume of essays on Dante by Dr. Dorothy L. Sayers will be eagerly sought by the many thousands of readers who already know her vigorous and vivid translation of the Inferno. As those who have heard Miss Sayer's lectures on Dante can testify, she brings to the interpretation of the Divine Comedy a vitalizing power of analysis and re-creation. Readers of Dante often become discouraged by the mass of factual detail which the older school of historical criticism has made available; mere aestheticism, however, unrelated to the time and space, is nor likely to satisfy them either. They will find in Miss Sayers' essays enough scholarly assistance to put themselves in the position of a contemporary reader; but their attention will chiefly be drawn to the relevance of the Divine Comedy to our present day world and way of life. Miss Sayers' emphasis on the ethical, rather than on the aesthetic, or historical, significance of Dante's work, comes as a welcome and bracing challenge to the confusion regarding values, whether of literature or of life, which characterizes the present age.
Author: Charles Till Davis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Author: John C. Barnes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781846824197
Category : Deadly sins in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This volume opens with the bold suggestion that the seven deadly sins constitute a key to the structure of Inferno and Paradiso, as well as Purgatorio. It ends with a discussion of cowardice (not strictly a deadly sin) in Inferno iii, followed by a look at Dante himself in the light of all the capital vices. In between, each of the seven is focused on in turn. Intellectual pride is cited as the reason for Cavalcanti's absence from the Commedia, while-separately-the pride cantos in Purgatorio are read as a reconstruction of the individual's passage from pride to piety. Envy is located in the political sphere and shown to be almost always figured in conjunction with other vices whose sinful acts it prompts. It is then argued that Dante clarifies problems encountered in medieval attempts to distinguish between just and unjust anger. Sloth in The Divine Comedy is explored next, with particular attention to the poet Statius, its only named exponent. The poet's understanding of avarice is placed in the context of the revived money economy and the papacy's inflated temporal pretensions, while that understanding is, secondly, viewed in relation to the ancient Romans. Gluttony occasions reflection about analogies between the body and the book, as well as remarks about illustrations of the gluttons' aerial bodies in The Divine Comedy's early printed editions. The ambivalence of Dante's principal representations of lust is seen to imply a tension in his great poem between love poetry and spirituality, a tension he seeks to resolve in Beatrice. (Series: UCD Foundation for Italian Studies) [Subject: Literary Criticism, Dante, Italian Studies, The Divine Comedy, Renaissance Italy]
Author: Jerome Mazzaro
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400856086
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
Jerome Mazzaro examines Dante's Vita Nuova as an artistic correlative to what Dante conceived as an image of himself. Specifically, he explores the structure of the work in relation to medieval views of memory, self, music, form, and interpretation, and against the facts of Dante's life and culture as we have come to know them. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Ismail Kadare
Publisher: Restless Books
ISBN: 1632061759
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
The Man Booker International–winning author of Broken April and The Siege, Albania’s most renowned novelist, and perennial Nobel Prize contender Ismail Kadare explores three giants of world literature—Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare—through the lens of resisting totalitarianism. In isolationist Albania, which suffered under a Communist dictatorship for nearly half a century, classic global literature reached Ismail Kadare across centuries and borders—and set him free. The struggles of Hamlet, Dante, and Aeschylus’s tragic figures gave him an understanding of totalitarianism that shaped his novels. In these incisive critical essays informed by personal experience, Kadare provides powerful evidence that great literature is the enemy of dictatorship and imbues these timeless stories with powerful new meaning. With eloquent prose and the narrative drive of a great mystery novel, Kadare renews our readings of the classics and lends them a distinctly Albanian tint. Like Mark Twain’s Mississippi River, Márquez’s Macondo, and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Kadare’s Albania emerges as a microcosm of civilization; here, blood vengeance in mountain communities reaches the dramatic heights of Hamlet’s dilemma, funereal rites take on the air of Greek tragedy, and political repression gives life the feel of Dante’s nine circles of Hell. Like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Essays on World Literature casts reading itself as a daring act of resistance to artistic suppression. Kadare’s insights into the Western canon secure his own place within it.
Author: Richard William Church
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Author: Guy P. Raffa
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674980832
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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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.
Author: Mark Vernon
Publisher: Angelico Press
ISBN: 1621387488
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 535
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Book Description
Dante Alighieri was early in recognizing that our age has a problem. His hometown, Florence, was at the epicenter of the move from the medieval world to the modern. He realized that awareness of divine reality was shifting, and that if it were lost, dire consequences would follow. The Divine Comedy was born in a time of troubling transition, which is why it still speaks today. Dante's masterpiece presents a cosmic vision of reality, which he invites his readers to traverse with him. In this narrative retelling and guide, from the gates of hell, up the mountain of purgatory, to the empyrean of paradise, Mark Vernon offers a vivid introduction and interpretation of a book that, 700 years on, continues to open minds and change lives.
Author: Giulia Gaimari
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787352277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research by international scholars on the themes of ethics, politics and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante’s modern ‘afterlife’. Together the chapters explore how Dante’s writings engage with the contemporary culture of medieval Florence and Italy, and how and why his political and moral thought still speaks compellingly to modern readers. The collection’s contributors range across different disciplines and scholarly traditions – history, philology, classical reception, philosophy, theology – to scrutinise Dante’s Divine Comedy and his other works in Italian and Latin, offering a multi-faceted approach to the evolution of Dante’s political, ethical and legal thought throughout his writing career. Certain chapters focus on his early philosophical Convivio and on the accomplished Latin Eclogues of his final years, while others tackle knotty themes relating to judgement, justice, rhetoric and literary ethics in his Divine Comedy, from hell to paradise. The closing chapters discuss different modalities of the public reception and use of Dante’s work in both Italy and Britain, bringing the volume’s emphasis on morality, political philosophy, and social justice into the modern age of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
