Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the Commedia

Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the Commedia PDF

Author: Nicolò Crisafi

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0192857673

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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.

Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the Commedia

Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the Commedia PDF

Author: Nicolò Crisafi

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-02-24

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0192672150

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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.

Iacopone da Todi

Iacopone da Todi PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-11-27

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9004682988

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The first ever collection of essays in English on Iacopone da Todi by a diverse group of international scholars, this book offers a contemporary critical assessment on this medieval Franciscan poet of the thirteenth century. Combining philological analyses with thematic studies and philosophical and theological interpretations of the original contents and style of Iacopone’s poetry, the collection considers a wide range of topics, from music to prayer and performance, mysticism, asceticism, ineffability, Mariology, art, poverty, and the challenges of translation. It is a major contribution to the understanding of Iacopone’s laude in the 21st century. Contributors are Erminia Ardissino, Alvaro Cacciotti, Nicolò Crisafi, Anne-Gaëlle Cuif, Federica Franzè, Alexander J.B. Hampton, Magdalena Maria Kubas, Matteo Leonardi, Brian K. Reynolds, Oana Sălișteanu, Samia Tawwab, Alessandro Vettori, Carlo Zacchetti, and Estelle Zunino.

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante PDF

Author: Giulia Gaimari

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2019-06-27

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1787352277

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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.

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England PDF

Author: Jonathan Hughes

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-02-24

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 1350146293

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Dante's Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England compares the intellectual, emotional, and religious world of Dante in 13th-century Florence with that of a group of English intellectuals gathered around Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, uncle of the King, Henry VI. Here, Jonathan Hughes establishes that there was a Renaissance in 15th-century England, encouraged by the discovery and translations of works of Greek philosophers and developments in science and medicine; and that vernacular writers in Gloucester's circle, such as John Lydgate and Robert Hoccleve, were of fundamental importance in exploring the meaning of the self and man's relationship with the natural world and the classical past. However, the appearance in 15th-century England of Dante's 'Commedia', the most popular work of the Middle Ages, served to remind writers and readers of the cost of intellectual enquiry: the loss of faith in a harmonious and beautiful world; the redemptive power of the love of a woman; and the tangible presence of an afterlife. Engagingly written and meticulously researched, this innovative study shines a new perspective on Dante scholarship as well as offering a unique anaylsis of intellectual thought and culture in 15th-century England.

The Oxford Handbook of Dante

The Oxford Handbook of Dante PDF

Author: Manuele Gragnolati

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 778

ISBN-13: 0198820747

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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.

The Oxford Handbook of Dante

The Oxford Handbook of Dante PDF

Author: Manuele Gragnolati

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-03-25

Total Pages: 752

ISBN-13: 0192552597

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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's Christian Ethics

Dante's Christian Ethics PDF

Author: George Corbett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-03-12

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1108489419

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This book is a major re-appraisal of the Commedia as originally envisaged by Dante: as a work of ethics. Privileging the ethical, Corbett increases our appreciation of Dante's eschatological innovations and literary genius. Drawing upon a wider range of moral contexts than in previous studies, this book presents an overarching account of the complex ordering and political programme of Dante's afterlife. Balancing close readings with a lucid overview of Dante's Commedia as an ethical and political manifesto, Corbett cogently approaches the poem through its moral structure. The book provides detailed interpretations of three particularly significant sins - pride, sloth, and avarice - and the three terraces of Purgatory devoted to them. While scholars register Dante's explicit confession of pride, the volume uncovers Dante's implicit confession of sloth and prodigality (the opposing subvice of avarice) through Statius, his moral cypher.