Dante's persistent and pervasive presence has been a remarkable feature of modern writing since the late eighteenth century. This collection of essays by an international group of scholars emphasizes that presence in the work of major British and Irish writers (such as Blake, Shelley, Joyce and Heaney). It also focuses on responses in America, the Caribbean and Italy and deals with appropriations of Dante's work by poets (from Gray to Walcott) and novelists (such as Mary Shelley and Giorgio Bassani, and Gloria Naylor).

A richly detailed graveyard history of the Florentine poet whose dead body shaped Italy from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the Risorgimento, World War I, and Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. Dante, whose Divine Comedy gave the world its most vividly imagined story of the afterlife, endured an extraordinary afterlife of his own. Exiled in death as in life, the Florentine poet has hardly rested in peace over the centuries. Like a saint’s relics, his bones have been stolen, recovered, reburied, exhumed, examined, and, above all, worshiped. Actors in this graveyard history range from Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo, and Pope Leo X to the Franciscan friar who hid the bones, the stone mason who accidentally discovered them, and the opportunistic sculptor who accomplished what princes, popes, and politicians could not: delivering to Florence a precious relic of the native son it had banished. In Dante’s Bones, Guy Raffa narrates for the first time the complete course of the poet’s hereafter, from his death and burial in Ravenna in 1321 to a computer-generated reconstruction of his face in 2006. Dante’s posthumous adventures are inextricably tied to major historical events in Italy and its relationship to the wider world. Dante grew in stature as the contested portion of his body diminished in size from skeleton to bones, fragments, and finally dust: During the Renaissance, a political and literary hero in Florence; in the nineteenth century, the ancestral father and prophet of Italy; a nationalist symbol under fascism and amid two world wars; and finally the global icon we know today.

Experiencing the Afterlife provides the first sustained analysis of popular, vernacular depictions of the afterlife written in Italy before the Divine Comedy by authors such as Uguccione da Lodi, Giacomino da Verona, and Bonvesin da la Riva. Manuele Gragnolati uses his readings of these poets to provide a new interpretation of Dante's work. Combining elements from several disciplines, he investigates the richness of high medieval eschatology and the concept of personal identity it expresses. Gragnolati is particularly concerned with how the notions of body and pain characteristic of medieval spirituality and devotion inform the eschatological representations of the time, especially in their paradoxical urge to stress at once the physical experience of the separated soul and the final necessity of bodily resurrection. By integrating lesser-known texts and scholarship from other disciplines into the specialized field of Dante studies, Gragnolati sheds new light on some of the most vigorously debated and crucial questions raised by the Divine Comedy, including the embryological discourse of Purgatorio 25, the relation between the soul's experience of pain in Purgatory and the devotion that late medieval culture expressed toward Christ's suffering, and the significance of the audacious vision of resurrected bodies that Dante the pilgrim enjoys at the end of his journey. At the same time, Gragnolati brings these questions back into contemporary discussions of medieval eschatology and opens new perspectives for current and future work on embodiment and identity. Scholars and students of Dante and Italian studies, as well as those in medieval history, religion, culture, and art history, will be rewarded by the fresh insights contained in Experiencing the Afterlife.

Using Dante’s Inferno to draw out the reality behind the fantasy, author Kim Paffenroth tells the true events… During his lost wanderings, Dante came upon an infestation of the living dead. The unspeakable acts he witnessed —cannibalism, live burnings, evisceration, crucifixion, and dozens more—became the basis of all the horrors described in Inferno. At last, the real story can be told.

The "left-handed designer," Seymour Chwast has been putting his unparalleled take-and influence-on the world of illustration and design for the last half century. In his version of Dante's Divine Comedy, Chwast's first graphic novel, Dante and his guide Virgil don fedoras and wander through noir-ish realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, finding both the wicked and the wondrous on their way. Dante Alighieri wrote his epic poem The Divine Comedy from 1308 to 1321 while in exile from his native Florence. In the work's three parts (Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise), Dante chronicles his travels throughthe afterlife, cataloging a multitude of sinners and saints-many of them real people to whom Dante tellingly assigned either horrible punishment or indescribable pleasure-and eventually meeting both God and Lucifer face-to-face. In his adaptation of this skewering satire, Chwast creates a visual fantasia that fascinates on every page: From the multifarious torments of the Inferno to the host of delights in Paradise, his inventive illustrations capture the delirious complexity of this classic of the Western canon.

This essential and widely used collection of visions of heaven and hell, the first in English, presents new translations of two visions and newly edited versions of previously translated ones. Describes the place of these works in medieval literature and provides a helpful resource for studying elements of medieval religion. Includes: St. Peter's Apocalypse, St. Paul's Apocalypse, St. Brendan's Voyage, St. Patrick's Purgatory, and the Visions of Furseus, Drythelm, Wetti, Charles the Fat, Tundale, the Monk of Evesham, and Thurkill. Bibliography, index, glossary, notes, illustrated.

This volume provides the first systematic study of the translation and reception of Dante’s Vita Nova in the Anglophone world, reconstructing for the first time the contexts and genesis of its English-language afterlife from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Dante is one of the foremost authors of the Western canon, and his Vita Nova has been repeatedly translated into English over the past two centuries. However, there exists no comprehensive account of the critical, scholarly, and creative English-language reception of Dante’s work. This collection brings together scholars from Dante studies, translation studies, English studies, and book history to examine the translation and reception of the Vita Nova among modern English-speaking publics, in both academic and non-academic contexts, and thus represents a major contribution to Dante studies. The Afterlife of Dante’s Vita Nova in the Anglophone World will be an essential reference point for scholars and students in English and Italian studies, literary and cultural studies, and translation and reception studies in the UK, Ireland, the USA, and Italy, where Dante is taught and researched.

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research by international scholars on the themes of ethics, politics and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante’s modern ‘afterlife’. Together the chapters explore how Dante’s writings engage with the contemporary culture of medieval Florence and Italy, and how and why his political and moral thought still speaks compellingly to modern readers. The collection’s contributors range across different disciplines and scholarly traditions – history, philology, classical reception, philosophy, theology – to scrutinise Dante’s Divine Comedy and his other works in Italian and Latin, offering a multi-faceted approach to the evolution of Dante’s political, ethical and legal thought throughout his writing career. Certain chapters focus on his early philosophical Convivio and on the accomplished Latin Eclogues of his final years, while others tackle knotty themes relating to judgement, justice, rhetoric and literary ethics in his Divine Comedy, from hell to paradise. The closing chapters discuss different modalities of the public reception and use of Dante’s work in both Italy and Britain, bringing the volume’s emphasis on morality, political philosophy, and social justice into the modern age of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Dante’s Deadly Sins is a unique study of the moral philosophy behind Dante’s master work that considers the Commedia as he intended, namely, as a practical guide to moral betterment. Focusing on Inferno and Purgatorio, Belliotti examines the puzzles and paradoxes of Dante’s moral assumptions, his treatment of the 7 deadly sins, and how 10 of his most powerful moral lessons anticipate modern existentialism. Analyzes the moral philosophy underpinning one of the greatest works of world culture Summarizes the Inferno and Purgatorio, while underscoring their moral implications Explains and evaluates Dante’s understanding of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ and the ultimate role they play as the basis of human transgression. Provides a detailed discussion of the philosophical concepts of moral desert and the law of contrapasso, using character case studies within Dante’s work Connects the poem’s moral themes to our own contemporary condition

During his lifetime, Dante was condemned as corrupt and banned from Florence on pain of death. But in 1329, eight years after his death, he was again viciously condemned—this time as a heretic and false prophet—by Friar Guido Vernani. From Vernani’s inquisitorial viewpoint, the author of the Commedia “seduced” his readers by offering them “a vessel of demonic poison” mixed with poetic fantasies designed to destroy the “healthful truth” of Catholicism. Thanks to such pious vituperations, a sulphurous fume of unorthodoxy has persistently clung to the mantle of Dante’s poetic fame. The primary critical purpose of Dante & the Unorthodox is to examine the aesthetic impulses behind the theological and political reasons for Dante’s allegory of mid-life divergence from the papally prescribed “way of salvation.” Marking the septicentennial of his exile, the book’s eighteen critical essays, three excerpts from an allegorical drama, and a portfolio of fourteen contemporary artworks address the issue of the poet’s conflicted relation to orthodoxy. By bringing the unorthodox out of the realm of “secret things,” by uncensoring them at every turn, Dante dared to oppose the censorious regime of Latin Christianity with a transgressive zeal more threatening to papal authority than the demonic hostility feared by Friar Vernani.