This book is a history of the influence of Dante on English poetry. The focus us not primarily upon stylistic influences or attempts to imitate Dante's manner of writing, but rather on the different guises in which the enormous presence of Dante has made itself felt, and how that presence has affected some of the central concerns of the poets in question. The poets considered are Shelley, Byron, Browning, Rossetti, Yeats, Pound and Eliot. In addition to analysing the way Dante is approached by these poets in their major poetry, Dr Ellis also discusses relevant critical works: Shelley's Defence of Poetry, Pound's The Spirit of Romance and Yeats' A Vision. The critical survey is unified by the attempt to show certain recurrent preoccupations in the work of these writers, such as the need to define a tradition in which Dante is a necessary forerunner. Ellis also shows that Dante has been read in a very partial way by these poets and the images of him which emerge in their works are inevitably varied and contradictory.

This is the first comprehensive critical comparison of English and Italian literature from the three centuries from Dante to Shakespeare. It begins by examining Chaucer's relationship with Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and then looks at similar relationships within the areas of humanist education, lyric poetry, the epic, theatrical comedy, the short story and the pastoral drama. It provides a detailed comparison of major works from both traditions including descriptive and critical readings of Italian works. It shows why English writers valued such works and demonstrates the ways in which they departed from or tried to outdo the Italian original. Assuming no prior knowledge of Italy or Italian literary history, this book introduces the student and general reader to one of the most important and fascinating phases in European literary history.

Fifteen specially-commissioned essays by distinguished scholars provide an introduction to Dante that is at once accessible and challenging.

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.

Translation has played a vital part in the history of literature throughout the English-speaking world. Offering for the first time a comprehensive view of this phenomenon, this pioneering five-volume work casts a vivid new light on the history of English literature. Incorporating critical discussion of translations, it explores the changing nature and function of translation and the social and intellectual milieu of the translators.