In Dante's wake : reading from medieval to modern in the Augustinian tradition / John Freccero ; edited by Danielle Callegari and Melissa Swain.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Freccero, John, author.

Contributor:

Callegari, Danielle, editor.

Swain, Melissa, editor.

Standardized Title:

Essays. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Divina commedia.

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321--Criticism and interpretation.

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321--Influence.

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321.

Divina commedia (Dante Alighieri).

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xv, 268 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2015.

Summary:

"Waking to find himself shipwrecked on a strange shore before a dark wood, the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy realizes he must set his sights higher and guide his ship to a radically different port. Starting on the sand of that very shore with Dante, John Freccero begins retracing the famous voyage recounted by the poet nearly 700 years ago. Freccero follows pilgrim and poet through the Comedy and then beyond, inviting readers both uninitiated and accomplished to join him in navigating this complex medieval masterpiece and its influence on later literature. Perfectly impenetrable in its poetry and unabashedly ambitious in its content, the Divine Comedy is the cosmos collapsed on itself, heavy with dense matter and impossible to expand. Yet Dante's great triumph is seen in the tiny, subtle fragments that make up the seamless whole, pieces that the poet painstakingly sewed together to form a work that insinuates itself into the reader and inspires the work of the next author. Freccero magnifies the most infinitesimal elements of that intricate construction to identify self-similar parts, revealing the full breadth of the great poem. Using this same technique, Freccero then turns to later giants of literature- Petrarch, Machiavelli, Donne, Joyce, and Svevo-demonstrating how these authors absorbed these smallest parts and reproduced Dante in their own work. In the process, he confronts questions of faith, friendship, gender, politics, poetry, and sexuality, so that traveling with Freccero, the reader will both cross unknown territory and reimagine familiar faces, swimming always in Dante's wake"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note:

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Editors' introduction

List of Figures

Shipwreck in the Prologue

The Portrait of Francesca: Inferno 5

Epitaph for Guido

The Eternal Image of the Father

Allegory and Autobiography

In the Wake of the Argo on a Boundless Sea

The Fig Tree and the Laurel

Medusa and the Madonna of Forlì: Political Sexuality in Machiavelli

Donne's Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Zeno's Last Cigarette

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780823264278

0823264270

9780823264285

0823264289

OCLC:

899949470