Dante's work has fascinated readers for seven hundred years and has provided key reference points for writing as diverse as that of Chaucer, the Renaissance poets, the English Romantics, Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, American writers from Melville through to Eliot and Pound, Anglo-Irish Modernists from Joyce to Beckett, and contemporary poets such as Heaney and Walcott.

    In this volume, Jeremy Tambling has selected ten recent essays from the mass of Dante studies, and put the Divine Comedy - Dante's record of a journey to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise - into context for the modern reader. Topics such as Dante's allegory, his relationship to classical and modern poetry, his treatment of love and of sexuality, his attitudes to Florence and to his contemporary Italy, are explored and clarified through a selection of work by some of the best scholars in the field. An introduction and notes help the reader to situate the criticism, and to relate it to contemporary literary theory. In this anthology, Dante's relevance to both English and Italian literature is highlighted, and the significance of Dante for poetry in English is illuminated for the modern reader.

    This book provides students of English literature and Italian literature with the most comprehensive collection of important critical studies of Dante to date.

    General Editors' Preface  Acknowledgements  Introduction: Dante and Modern Criticism  1. KENELM FOSTER, An Intoduction to the 'Inferno'  2. RICARDO J. QUINONES, 'Inferno': Fame and Children  3. RACHEL JACOFF, Transgression and Transcendence: Figures of Female Desire in Dante's 'Commedia'  4. PIERO BOITANI, Shipwreck: Interpretation and Alterity  5. TEODOLINDA BAROLINI, Bertan de Born and Sordello: The Poetry of Politics in Dante's 'Comedy'  6. JEREMY TAMBLING, "Nostro Paccato Fu Ermafrodito": Dante and the Moderns  7. JOHN FRECCERO, An Introduction to the 'Paradiso'  8. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA, Theology and Exile  9. PETER DRONKE, The Conclusion of Dante's 'Commedia'  10. ZYGMUNT G. BARANSKI, "Significar per verba": Notes on Dante and Plurilingualism  Glossary of Terms  Chronology  Suggestions for Further Reading

    Biography

    Professor Jeremy Tambling