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22038 results in Cambridge Companions

Page 286 of 1102

  • 2 - Dante Alighieri, Dante-poet, Dante-character

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 28-42

  • Summary

    The Commedia is constructed as a first-person narrative, where the narrator and the character share a common identity that underpins an autobiographical structure. This chapter explores the relationships between the narrator, Dante the poet, and the protagonist, Dante the poet, as well as the autobiographical significance of these relationships and of other elements. It studies how Dante the poet interrupts his narrative through introductions, invocations, declarations of novelty, wonder, and ineffability. The Commedia also reveals how the protagonist became aware of the mission of becoming the divinely ordained author of a poem which recounts what has been revealed to him during his journey. Other important autobiographical elements are the post eventum prophecies related to Dante’s exile from Florence. Dante the character is also a poet and author of the Vita nova and other poems. During the journey, the pilgrim encounters many poets, writers, and other characters associated with literary activity. These meetings are used to reflect on the literary experience these figures embody as well as a rethinking of Dante’s own literary career. Another important aspect is the presence of biblical, classical, and medieval models underpinning the construction of the protagonist-poet.

  • 15 - Early Reception until 1481

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 245-258

  • Summary

    Abstract: This chapter will explore the reception of Dante’s Commedia from its earliest dissemination in the second decade of the fourteenth century through to 1481, the date that marks the publication of the most important Renaissance commentary by Cristoforo Landino. The process of canonization of the poem will be outlined through a survey of its commentary tradition and of its editorial history, one in which Giovanni Boccaccio plays a major role. The analysis of the unalloyed celebration and political exploitation of the poem in Medici’s Florence is complemented by an investigation of contestations and resistance, most notably by Petrarch and by humanists such as Leonardo Bruni. Few works in Western literature have influenced such a broad range of readers as the Commedia. Alongside learned response, I shall constantly highlight the dynamics of transmission, dissemination and reception of the poem across an exceptionally large and diversified audience, through different media. Substantial attention will be paid to the visualizations of the poem in manuscripts and in monumental works of art.

  • 6 - Language and Style

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 95-109

  • Summary

    This chapter provides a detailed assessment of linguistic and stylistic issues and features in the Commedia. It first surveys Dante’s use of language and linguistic awareness in his other works (Vita nova, doctrinal canzoni, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia) before turning to the ways these earlier experiments converge and are refined further in the Commedia. The analysis covers questions of phonology and morphology, the poem’s remarkably rich lexicon (including Latinisms, Gallicisms, and scientific and philosophical language), syntax, and use of mimesis, deixis, dialogue and other techniques to heighten dramatic representation.

  • 3 - Characterization

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 43-60

  • Summary

    ¶This chapter studies the nature and meaning of the Comedy's third-person characters. It places them on a static-dynamic axis based on their involvement in Genette's three narrative levels: story, plot, and narration. Such a multi-faceted consideration of character respects, at once: the integrity of the poem’s fictional world (story); the represented personhood of its characters (plot); and the author’s discretion in composing the narrative (narration). ¶Encounters with static characters, who appear in only one zone of the Afterlife, often resemble bounded microtexts. Readers have sometimes viewed these as expressions of Dante’s ideological commitments. But a narrative relies on characterization to enunciate all claims, including conceptual ones. The multiple voices that produce the Comedy are thus inseparable from its engagement with its context, intellectual and otherwise. ¶Like the protagonist, dynamic characters travel across textual or eschatological boundaries. These figures are usually of structural importance and we often gain access to their perspective. They thus mediate between the diversity of dialogues with static characters and the unity of the protagonist’s journey.

  • 14 - Transmission History

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 229-244

  • Summary

    This chapter surveys the history of editorial engagement with the text of the Commedia, from the earliest times immediately following Dante’s death in 1321 up to the present day. Some 800 copies of the poem survive in manuscript form; since 1472 there have been hundreds of printed editions. Against a broad overview of the transmission history of the poem, the author highlights the inherent difficulties of working with a rich manuscript tradition; illustrates scribal contaminatory practices with concrete examples; and outlines the linguistic situation in Italy in Dante’s time, a key problem for an editor of his poem. She analyses the efforts of fourteenth-century editors (pre-eminent among them Giovanni Boccaccio and Filippo Villani), confronted with the task of producing a reliable text of the poem relying only on their own knowledge and literary sensitivity, with no established methodology to guide them; and the achievements of scholars in the last one hundred and fifty years, as philologists have developed and refined the stemmatic or genealogical method. The editions of Casella, Vandelli, Petrocchi, Lanza and Sanguineti are analysed in this context. The chapter concludes with a brief account of the latest endeavours in what remains an intensely productive field of Dante scholarship.

  • 13 - Genesis, Dating, and Dante’s ‘Other Works’

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 208-228

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the varied relationships that the Commedia forges with his own ‘other works’, and considers the presence of both overt allusions and indirect references, the metacritical and clarificatory function assigned to some texts, the ways these works serve as the linguistic and stylistic training-ground for the Commedia’s plurilingual experimentation, their value as supplementary material in expounding Commedia, and in elucidating its compositional history. Particular attention is paid to Dante’s reflection on his poetic past (Vita nova) in the opening cantos of the poem, the relevance and status of the Convivio, passage of lyric autocitation, and discussion of dating and genesis of the poem.

  • 4 - Moral Structure

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 61-78

  • Summary

    This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the moral structure of each of the three realms of Dante’s afterlife: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. It examines Dante’s sources, ethical criteria, and topography, as well as his representation of moral structure in the narrative itself, and its political implications. The first section analyses the four principal regions of Hell through Virgil’s rationale: the circles of incontinence, the ‘rings’ of violence, the ‘pouches’ of simple fraud, and the pit of treacherous fraud. It then explores the three groups of souls that Virgil strikingly leaves out: the ‘neutrals’, the virtuous pagans in Limbo, and the heretics. The second section addresses four key differences between Infernal and Purgatorial suffering, explains the moral theories of disordered love and the seven capital sins underpinning the seven terraces of Dante’s Purgatory, and examines the theologically original antechamber of Purgatory, and the Earthly Paradise at the mountain’s summit. The third section highlights Dante’s distinction between what Paradise is and how it is conveyed, and shows how his layered vision of Paradise overlaps the scheme of the four cardinal and three theological virtues with the theory of astral influence on personality.

  • 12 - Politics

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 192-207

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the status of the Comedy as a ‘political’ poem, in relation to Dante’s political context in the Italy of the early fourteenth century, his own political thought, and to the way in which the journey which the poem describes is construed as progressing from a wicked community, via a 'community under construction', to the perfect 'City of God' in Heaven. It argues that the notion of community – that is, of the way in which human beings live in relation to one another – is central to the Comedy's theology and poetics as well as to Dante's political thought. It examines the ways in which the three main political structures of Dante’s world – the city, and especially Dante’s own city of Florence, the Church and the Empire – are presented in the poem and contribute to the reader’s understanding of what constitutes ‘true’ citizenship, from both an earthly and an eschatological perspective.

  • 16 - Later Reception from 1481 to the Present

  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Simon Gilson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
    Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018, pp 259-270

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the reception of Dante’s Commedia from the late fifteenth century to the present day, reconstructing the ways Dante’s work enters the canon of world literature after suffering oblivion throughout the early modern age. By keeping a strongly intermedial perspective – the chapter does not only cover editions and translations of the Commedia, but also literary, theatrical, visual, and cinematic works inspired by it –,  it proposes a new periodization of Dante’s reception. The first section covers the years from the Florentine edition of 1481 to 1766, examining what is arguably the lowest point in the history of Dante’s fame. The second section moves from 1767 – the first complete translation of the Commedia into a modern language – and covers the years up to 1830, witnessing the pan-European re-appreciation of Dante on the part of anti-Classicist and Romantic movements. The third section, ‘1831-1913’, focuses on the Italian and Anglo-American environments, examining the birth of a modern scholarship on Dante and the reception of the Commedia as the model for a totalizing work of art. The last one maps Dante’s presence in the twentieth century and beyond, and especially of the Inferno as a framework for narrativizing the horrors of the present.

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades
  • Edited by Anthony Bale
  • Published online:
    14 December 2018
    Print publication:
    03 January 2019
  • How were the Crusades, and the crusaders, narrated, described, and romanticised by the various communities that experienced or remembered them? This Companion provides a critical overview of the diverse and multilingual literary output connected with crusading over the last millennium, from the first writings which sought to understand and report on what was happening, to contemporary medievalism, in which crusading is a potent image of holy war and jihad. The chapters show the enduring legacy of the crusaders' imagery, from the chansons de geste to Walter Scott, from Charlemagne to Orlando Bloom. Whilst the crusaders' hold on Jerusalem was relatively short-lived, the desire for Jerusalem has had a long afterlife in many cultural contexts and media.

The Cambridge Companion to Dante's ‘Commedia'
  • Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, Simon Gilson
  • Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2018
  • This newly commissioned volume presents a focused overview of Dante's masterpiece, the Commedia, offering readers of today wide-ranging insights into the poem and its core features. Leading scholars discuss matters of structure, narrative, language and style, characterization, doctrine, and politics, in chapters that make their own contributions to Dante criticism by raising problems and questions that call for renewed attention, while investigating contextual concerns as well as the current state of criticism about the poem. The Commedia is also placed in a variety of cultural and historical contexts through accounts of the poem's transmission and reception that explore both its contemporary influence and its continuing legacy today. With its accessible approach, its unstinting focus on the poem and its attention to matters that have not always received adequate critical assessment, this volume will be of value to all students and scholars of Dante's great poem.

Page 286 of 1102