A sequel to Philip Terry's Dante's Inferno (2014), where Dante relocates to the University of Essex, here the action shifts from Dante's Island of Purgatory to Mersea Island, in Essex still, where the poet and his guide Ted Berrigan climb a mountain made out of Flexible Rock Substitute (FRS). Dante's artists are replaced with contemporary artists and artists-in-residence on the Essex Alp, including Grayson Perry, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst. Hirst, an example of pride, is encountered not carrying a rock on his back, as in Dante, but carrying a washing-machine, a Siemens Avantgarde, which runs through its spin cycle as he carries it. Other characters encountered include Christopher Marlowe, Boris Johnson, Lady Diana, Jean Paul Getty, Hilary Clinton, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, Martin McGuinness, Ciaran Carson and Anoushka S hankar. On the final terrace, the poet, accompanied by Berrigan and poet Tim Atkins, passes through a wall of flames to reach Dante's Paradise, here modelled on the Eden Project, where the poet meets his Beatrice, Marina Warner. The poem comes to a climax with an interview with Marina Warner in the LRB Tent, followed by a gig from the Pogues, for which Shane MacGowan has been brought up from Hell on an Arts Council 'Exceptional Talent' scheme.

Dante Alighieri was early in recognizing that our age has a problem. His hometown, Florence, was at the epicenter of the move from the medieval world to the modern. He realized that awareness of divine reality was shifting, and that if it were lost, dire consequences would follow. The Divine Comedy was born in a time of troubling transition, which is why it still speaks today. Dante's masterpiece presents a cosmic vision of reality, which he invites his readers to traverse with him. In this narrative retelling and guide, from the gates of hell, up the mountain of purgatory, to the empyrean of paradise, Mark Vernon offers a vivid introduction and interpretation of a book that, 700 years on, continues to open minds and change lives.

The best and most eloquent introduction to Dante for our time. Prue Shaw is one of the world's foremost authorities on Dante. Written with the general reader in mind, Reading Dante brings her knowledge to bear in an accessible yet expert introduction to his great poem. This is far more than an exegesis of Dante’s three-part Commedia. Shaw communicates the imaginative power, the linguistic skill and the emotional intensity of Dante’s poetry—the qualities that make the Commedia perhaps the greatest literary work of all time and not simply a medieval treatise on morality and religion. The book provides a graphic account of the complicated geography of Dante's version of the afterlife and a sure guide to thirteenth-century Florence and the people and places that influenced him. At the same time it offers a literary experience that lifts the reader into the universal realms of poetry and mythology, creating links not only to the classical world of Virgil and Ovid but also to modern art and poetry, the world of T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney and many others. Dante's questions are our questions: What is it to be a human being? How should we judge human behavior? What matters in life and in death? Reading Dante helps the reader to understand Dante’s answers to these timeless questions and to see how surprisingly close they sometimes are to modern answers. Reading Dante is an astonishingly lyrical work that will appeal to both those who’ve never read the Commedia and those who have. It underscores Dante's belief that poetry can change human lives.

In the middle of the journey of our life Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood but then he founds a whole lot of literary movements and arguably modernity itself with his Divine Comedy that, nonetheless, inexplicably, didn't make God laugh. This serious absence caused God's non-divine counterparts, humans, to wonder: "Why are we in hell?" "Why is it so funny?" "And why can't I laugh?"

This book is a major re-appraisal of the Commedia as originally envisaged by Dante: as a work of ethics. Privileging the ethical, Corbett increases our appreciation of Dante's eschatological innovations and literary genius. Drawing upon a wider range of moral contexts than in previous studies, this book presents an overarching account of the complex ordering and political programme of Dante's afterlife. Balancing close readings with a lucid overview of Dante's Commedia as an ethical and political manifesto, Corbett cogently approaches the poem through its moral structure. The book provides detailed interpretations of three particularly significant sins - pride, sloth, and avarice - and the three terraces of Purgatory devoted to them. While scholars register Dante's explicit confession of pride, the volume uncovers Dante's implicit confession of sloth and prodigality (the opposing subvice of avarice) through Statius, his moral cypher.

Imagine if you will, a satirical retelling of Dante Aligheri’s Inferno starring Mickey Mouse. This is the very first of the world-famouse, er, famous Great Parodies featuring classic Disney stars in outrageous spoofs of the world’s greatest stories.

An account of the Copernican Revolution, focusing on the significance of the plurality of the revolution which encompassed not only mathematical astronomy, but also conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion.

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