Dante and the making of a modern author / Albert Russell Ascoli.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ascoli, Albert Russell, 1953- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321--Authorship.

Dante Alighieri.

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

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvii, 458 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Other Title:

Dante & the Making of a Modern Author

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

The author in history

An author in the works: Dante before the commedia

Definitions: the vowels of authority

Language: "neminem ante nos"

Auto-commentary: dividing Dante

Authority in person: Dante between monarchia and the commedia

No judgment among equals: dividing authority in Dante's monarchia

Palinode and history

The author of the commedia.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-107-18529-7

1-281-25498-3

9786611254988

0-511-38730-X

0-511-48571-9

0-511-38627-3

0-511-38444-0

0-511-38263-4

0-511-38829-2

OCLC:

476146263