Abstract
Dante’s afterlife has had a powerful and often daunting effect upon later writers, both medieval and modern. Petrarch presents acute symptoms of anxiety of influence in a letter to Boccaccio, where he cannot bring himself to mention Dante’s name, even as he acknowledges his poetry’s dangerous status as a possible model for imitation; whilst Joyce also shows a twitch of such apprehension in his ironic characterisation of ‘the divine comic Denti Alligator’.1
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Selective Bibliography
The main collections of primary material, illustrating responses to Dante’s work from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, are:
Toynbee, Paget (ed.), Dante in English Literature: From Chaucer to Cary (c. 1380–1844), 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1909).
Caesar, Michael (ed.), Dante: The Critical Heritage 1314(?)-1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).
Griffiths, Eric, and Reynolds, Matthew (eds), Dante in English (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998) (an anthology of responses and translations).
Samples of American Dante criticism, from 1813 to 1981 are provided in: Giamatti, A. Bartlett (ed.), Dante in America: The First Two Centuries (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1983).
General surveys of Dante’s reputation from the fourteenth century onwards can be found in the excellent Introduction to Caesar’s 1989 volume (pp. 1–88), and in:
Friederich, Werner P., Dante’s Fame Abroad, 1350–1850 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1950).
Vallone, Aldo, Storia della critica dantesca dal xiv al xx secolo, 2 vols (Padua: Vallardi, 1981).
Wallace, David, ‘Dante in English’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. R. Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 237–58.
There are some illuminating insights into later visions and revisions of Dante (especially in Pellico and Eliot) in: Menocal, Maria, Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccaccio (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1991).
Translations of the Commedia into English up to 1966 are listed and described in:
Cunningham, Gilbert F., The Divine Comedy in English: A Critical Bibliography, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1965–6).
There is also a lucid and concise study of British and American translation, from Henry Boyd’s (1785–1802) to John Ciardi’s (1954–70), in: De Sua, William J., Dante into English (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1964).
More recent translations and issues relating to them are discussed in: Reynolds, Barbara, ‘Translating Dante in the 1990s’, Translation and Literature, 4 (2) (1995), pp. 221–37.
There is also a collection of essays on the modern reception and translation of Dante in Europe, the USA, the Middle East and the Far East in: Esposito, Enzo (ed.), L’opera di Dante nel mondo (Ravenna: Longo, 1992).
Early responses to Dante (from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries) are discussed in:
Paolazzi, Carlo, Dante e la ‘Commedia’ nel trecento (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1989).
Thompson, David and Nagel, Alan F. (eds), The Three Crowns of Florence: Humanist Assessments of Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio (New York: Harper & Row. 19721.
Grayson, Cecil, ‘Dante and the Renaissance’, in Italian Studies Presented to E. R. Vincent, ed. C. P. Brand et al. (Cambridge: Heffer, 1962), pp. 57–75.
Kirkpatrick, Robin, English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue and Divergence (London: Longman, 1995).
Samuel, Irene, Dante and Milton: The ‘Commedia’ and ‘Paradise Lost’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966).
See also the relevant sections of Toynbee (1909), Caesar (1989) and Vallone (1981).
Eighteenth-century assessments of Dante are induded in:
Corrigan, Beatrice (ed.), Italian Poets and English Critics, 1755–1859 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
Eighteenth-century attitudes and translations are given detailed attention in: Tinkler-Villani, Valeria, Visions of Dante in English Poetry: Translations of the ‘Commedia’ from Jonathan Richardson to William Blake (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), Chapters 1–7.
Romantic readings and their contexts are discussed in:
Brand, Charles R, Italy and the English Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 19571.
Ellis, Steve, Dante and English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Chapters 1 and 2.
Pite, Ralph, The Circle of Our Vision: Dante’s Presence in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
Webb, Timothy, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19761, pp. 276–336.
Zuccato, Edoardo, Coleridge in Italy (Cork and New York: Cork University Press and St Martin’s Press, 1996).
For Victorian responses, see:
Ellis, Steve, Dante and English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Chapter 3 and 4 (on Browning and D. G. Rossetti).
Bidney, Martin, ‘The “Central Fiery Heart”: Ruskin’s Remaking of Dante’, Victorian Newsktter, 48 (Fall 1975), pp. 9–15.
Milbank, Alison, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).
Twentieth-century reception of Dante is considered in:
Ellis, Steve, Dante and English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Chapter 5–7 (on Yeats, Pound and Eliot).
McDougal, Stuart Y. (ed.), Dante Among the Moderns (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) (essays on Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Auden, Stevens, Beckett and Binyon).
Wilhelm, James J., Dante and Pound: The Epic of Judgment (Orono, ME: University of Maine Press, 1974).
Reynolds, Mary T., Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
Manganiello, Dominic, T. S. Eliot and Dante (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).
Agenda, 34 (3–4) (Autumn—Winter 1996–7): ‘Dante, Ezra Pound and the Contemporary Poet’ (new translations and essays on Pound, Heaney, and translation).
A recent Italian realization of the Commedia as theatre involved the avantgarde director Federico Tiezzi and three contemporary poets. The three versions were staged by Tiezzi at Prato and Bari between 1989 and 1991 and were published by Costa and Nolan (Genoa), as follows: Sanguineti, Edoardo, Commedia dell’Inferno: un travestimento dantesco (1989)
Luzi, Mario, Il Purgatorio: La notte lava la mente (1990) Giudici, Giovanni, Il Paradiso: Perché mi vinse il lume d’esta stella (1991).
All three versions are primarily montages of major speeches and encounters in the respective cantiche. Sanguineti’s Inferno incorporates passages from several other writers, medieval and modern (Chrétien de Troyes, Pound etc.); Luzi’s Purgatorio includes some of his own choric verse; and Giudici’s Paradiso has some Shandyesque dialogue involving the ‘Author’, ‘Cleric’ and ‘Literary Critic’, and has parts for several extra-Dantean characters, such as Tiresias and Kafka.
American traditions of criticism and translation are well traced up to the early twentieth century in:
La Piana, Angelica, Dante’s American Pilgrimage: A Historical Survey of Dante Studies in the United States, 1800–1944 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1948).
See also the samples of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American criticism in Giamatti (1983) (Section 1, above). There is a brief but lively critical discussion of Dante’s presence in American literature, from Hawthorne and Melville to Duncan and Baraka, in: Cambon, Glauco, Dante’s Craft: Studies in Language and Style (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), Chapter 7, pp. 119–45.
See also Cambon’s essays on Wallace Stevens in McDougal (1985) [8], and on Galway Kinnell in:
Paolucci, Anne (ed.), Dante’s Influence on American Writers 1776–1976 (New York: Griffon House, 1977), pp. 31–9.
On James Merrill’s Divine Comedies (Oxford & London: Oxford University Press, 1977), see: Jacoff, Rachel, ‘Merrill and Dante’, in James Merrill: Essays in Criticism, ed. D. Lehman and C. Berger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 145–8.
On the traditions of illustrating the Commedia, see:
Brieger, Peter, Meiss, Millard, and Singleton, Charles (eds), Illuminated Manuscripts of the ’Divine Comedy’, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 19691.
Toynbee, Paget, ‘Dante in English Art’, supplement to the Thirty-Eighth Annual Report of the Dante Society (Cambridge, Mass.) 1919 (Boston, MA: Dante Society, 1921).
Klonsky Milton, Blake’s Dante: The Complete Illustrations to the ‘Divine Comedy’ (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980).
Nassar, Eugene P., Illustrations of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994).
A Note on Film and Video: the earliest film versions of subjects from the Commedia appear to have inherited the theatrical tradition that spawned so many Dantean tragedies in the nineteenth century. These indude four versions of Francesca da Rimini (USA, 1907; Italy, 1908; Italy, 1910; USA, 1910); two of Pia de’ Tolomei (Italy, 1908 and 1910); and one of Il conte Ugolino (Italy, 1909). The 54-scene Milano Films version of the Inferno (Padovan/Bertolini, Italy 1911) was one of the earliest feature films to be widely circulated. It was shown in France, Germany and England, as well as the USA, where receipts are said to have come to $2m (See Plate 6, and for reviews see The Bioscope, 14 (1912), pp. 671, 747, and 17 (1912), pp. 319, 385).
Jannucci, Amilcare, ‘Dante Produces Television, Lectura Dantis, 13 (1993), pp. 32–46, esp. pp. 39–44;
Transcript, 1.1(December 1994), pp. 6–27 (interview with Greenaway), esp. PP. 6–7;
Vickers, Nancy J., ‘Dante in the Video Decade’, in Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies, ed. T. J. Cachey (Notre Dame, In & London: Notre Dame University Press, 1995), pp. 263–76.
The best general survey of the whole subject is: Casadio, Gianfranco (ed.), Dante nel cinema (Ravenna: Longo, 1996).
Welle, John P. ‘Dante in the Cinematic Mode: An Historical Survey of Dante Movies’, in Dante‘s ‘Inferno’: The Indiana Critical Edition, ed. M. Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 1995), pp. 381–95.
Finally, for a sampling of significant assessments of Dante and his afterlife over the period that this book covers, the following texts are recommended:
Coleridge’s lecture-notes on Dante (1818/19), reprinted in both Toynbee (1909), vol. I, pp. 620–6, and Caesar (1989), pp. 439–47;
Francesco De Sanctis’s discussion of Dante in his Storia della letteratura italiana (1870–1). The English version is in F. De Sanctis, History of Italian Literature, trans. J. Redfern (London, 1932), vo1. 1, pp. 177–91; also reprinted in Caesar (1989), pp. 625–37;
L S. Eliot’s 1929 essay, Dante, reprinted in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. F. Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), pp. 205–30;
Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation about Dante’ (1933), translated and reprinted in Osip Mandelstam: The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, ed. J. G. Harris, trans. J. G. Harris and C. Link (London: Collins Harvill, 19911, pp. 397–442;
Allen Tate’s 1951 ‘discourse’ on Dante: ‘The Symbolic Imagination’, in The Man of Letters in the Modern World: Selected Essays, 1928–1955 (New York: Meridian, 1955), pp. 93–112; also reprinted in Giamatti (1983), vv. 256–73;
Seamus Heaney’s 1985 article, ‘Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet’, Irish University Review, 15 (Spring 1985), pp. 5–19.
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Havely, N. (1998). Introduction: Dante’s Afterlife, 1321–1997 . In: Havely, N. (eds) Dante’s Modern Afterlife. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26975-4_1
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