Virgil The Blind Guide

Virgil the Blind Guide examines the repetition of certain linguistic configurations that have remained hidden because the meanings of the words involved do not relate to Virgil's competence as guide. Uncovering tropes that have yet to be studied, Howard allows us to see new junctures in the poet's travels, while highlighting Virgil's impotence and diminishing his authority as regards other poets, guides, and the demons of Hell's lower gate. The concealed route revealed by Dante's figurative signposts establishes Virgil's traits as foundational to the poem and allows for new perspectives and understandings of this critical character. Using this distinctive strategy, Virgil the Blind Guide helps us to piece together the complex puzzle that is Dante's pagan guide and suggests new ways of understanding important characters that are applicable to a broad range of poetry and prose.

Virgil the Blind Guide examines the repetition of certain linguistic configurations that have remained hidden because the meanings of the words involved do not relate to Virgil's competence as guide. Uncovering tropes that have yet to be studied, Howard allows us to see new junctures in the poet's travels, while highlighting Virgil's impotence and diminishing his authority as regards other poets, guides, and the demons of Hell's lower gate. The concealed route revealed by Dante's figurative signposts establishes Virgil's traits as foundational to the poem and allows for new perspectives and understandings of this critical character. Using this distinctive strategy, Virgil the Blind Guide helps us to piece together the complex puzzle that is Dante's pagan guide and suggests new ways of understanding important characters that are applicable to a broad range of poetry and prose.

This pioneering study reveals the central place held by Virgil's 'messianic' Eclogue in the art and literature of Renaissance Italy.

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.

The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt: Dramaturgical Leaves: Richard Wagner completes the second half of Liszt’s writings about stage works, its composers, and music drama. In this volume, Liszt focuses on the works of his most controversial devotee and son-in-law, Richard Wagner, whose music dramas Liszt championed as conductor during his tenure in Weimar. Here, we see Liszt prove his skill and expertise as a music critic, as well. He offers a critical analysis of the aesthetic and musical principles that underlie Wagner’s operas, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and The Flying Dutchman, including a thorough discussion of Wagner’s Leitmotif system of composition. Additionally, his findings are substantiated with a plethora of music examples, which will satisfy those who wanted greater musical substance from his writings. He also foretells the magnitude of Wagner’s influence on prosperity in his pamphlet-length essay, The Rhine’s Gold. Finally, the editor and translator of this volume, Janita Hall-Swadley, provides a unique perspective on these same principles, which is based on Wagner’s own mysterious diagram of “The Philosopher’s Stone,” which was supposed to be included in the original 1863 edition of the composer’s important writing, Opera and Drama, but never made it to publication.

Monumental epic poem tells the heroic story of Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the burning ruins of Troy to found Lavinium, the parent city of Rome, in the west.

Jean Hollander, an accomplished poet, and Robert Hollander, a renowned scholar and master teacher, whose joint translation of the Inferno was acclaimed as a new standard in English, bring their respective gifts to Purgatorio in an arresting and clear verse translation. Featuring the original Italian text opposite the translation, their edition offers an extensive and accessible introduction as well as generous historical and interpretive commentaries that draw on centuries of scholarship and Robert Hollander’s own decades of teaching and reasearch. In the second book of Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy, Dante has left hell and begins the ascent of the mount of purgatory. Just as hell had its circles, purgatory, situated at the threshold of heaven, has its terraces, each representing one of the seven mortal sins. With Virgil again as his guide, Dante climbs the mountain; the poet shows us, on its slopes, those whose lives were variously governed by pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. As he witnesses the penance required on each successive terrace, Dante often feels the smart of his own sins. His reward will be a walk through the garden of Eden, perhaps the most remarkable invention in the history of literature.