Dante And The Romantics

The British Romantic poets were among the first to realise the centrality of the Divine Comedy for the evolution of the European epic. This study explores the significance of Dante for Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and William Blake. What was their idea of Dante? Why did they feel the need to approach his Christian epic on the afterlife? This study aims to answer these questions by focusing on the three poets' preoccupation with form and language.

Dante played a major role in the evolution of the European epic, a fact first recognised by the Romantic poets. Braida explores the importance of the 'Divine Comedy' for Keats, Shelley & Blake, seeking to know what drew them to this Christian fantasy.

Dante on View opens an important new dimension in Dante studies: for the first time a collection of essays analyses the presence of the Italian Medieval poet Dante Alighieri in the visual and performing arts from the Middle Ages to the present day. The essays in this volume explore the image of Dante emerging in medieval illuminated manuscripts and later ideological and nostalgic uses of the poet. The volume also demonstrates the rich diversity of projects inspired by the Commedia both as an overall polysemic structure and as a repository of scenes, which generate a repertoire for painters, actors and film-makers. In its original multimediality, Dante's Commedia stimulates the performance of readers and artists working in different media from manuscript to stage, from ballet to hyperinstruments, from film to television. Through such a variety of media, the reception of Dante in the visual and performing arts enriches our understanding of the poet and of the arts represented at key moments of formal and structural change in the European cultural world.

Boldrini examines how Dante's literary and linguistic theories helped shape Joyce's radical narrative techniques.

From the artistic practice of improvisation to the politics of nationalism, the essays in this volume break new ground and significantly extend our understanding of the relations between British and Italian culture in its analysis of the reception of Dante and Italian literature in British Romanticism.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, no task seemed more urgent to German Romantics than the creation of a new mythology. It would unite modern poets and grant them common ground, and bring philosophers and the Volk closer together. But what would a new mythology look like? Only one model sufficed, according to Friedrich Schlegel: Dante’s Divine Comedy. Through reading and juxtaposing canonical and obscure texts, Dante in Deutschland shows how Dante’s work shaped the development of German Romanticism; it argues, all the while, that the weight of Dante’s influence induced a Romantic preoccupation with authority: Who was authorized to create a mythology? This question—traced across texts by Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe—begets a Neo-Romantic fixation with Dantean authority in the mythic ventures of Gerhart Hauptmann, Rudolf Borchardt, and Stefan George. Only in Thomas Mann’s novels, DiMassa asserts, is the Romantics’ Dantean project ultimately demythologized.

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.