Dante's Divine Comedy : A Journey Without End
- Submitting institution
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The University of East Anglia
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 182635157
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Head of Zeus
- ISBN
- 978-1786690807
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- August
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- What is the relevance of The Divine Comedy to us today? Given our distance from medieval theology, inevitably Dante’s three-part journey into the afterlife is hard at times for us to understand. Aside from academic Dantisti, who could be interested in such an antique work? The modern reader merely looks on bemused as money-brokers, corrupted popes, as well as fate-smitten figures from Classical Greek and Roman mythology, address the Italian poet directly from the flames of damnation.
The poem was written to inspire divine awe, and yet, the deeper I researched, the more I came to this conclusion: The Divine Comedy speaks to us today not because we fear damnation or are moved by the beauty of the Christian revelation, but because Dante wrote the story of an ordinary individual – an Everyman – who sets out hopefully in this life in search of renewal. The poem still resonates because it is a pilgrimage of sorts – a turning to a better life. My research led me to contemplate the influence of Dante in the counter-culture cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini and in a surprising array of popular books and media, from the Lemony Snicket series for children to Japanese anime film and the Doom video games. And Dante’s decision to write The Divine Comedy in his native Tuscan idiom rather than in Latin makes him the “father” of modern literature. Dante’s rejection of Latin preceded Chaucer’s by eighty years, and ensured that Tuscan would become Italy’s literary language and, eventually, its national language. Italian might be a quite different language today had Dante come from Milan, say, or Palermo.
The book is not an expert’s analysis or a dense critical re-interpretation, but what every lover of Dante Alighieri needs close by: a reader’s companion.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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