Freccero, John. In Dante's wake : reading from medieval to modern in the Augustinian tradition

Folger bibliographic ID: 345090
Folger call number: PQ4390 .F825 2015
Folger holdings ID: 495936

"Waking to find himself shipwrecked on a strange shore before a dark wood, the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy realizes he must set his sights higher and guide his ship to a radically different port. Starting on the sand of that very shore with Dante, John Freccero begins retracing the famous voyage recounted by the poet nearly 700 years ago. Freccero follows pilgrim and poet through the Comedy and then beyond, inviting readers both uninitiated and accomplished to join him in navigating this complex medieval masterpiece and its influence on later literature. Perfectly impenetrable in its poetry and unabashedly ambitious in its content, the Divine Comedy is the cosmos collapsed on itself, heavy with dense matter and impossible to expand. Yet Dante's great triumph is seen in the tiny, subtle fragments that make up the seamless whole, pieces that the poet painstakingly sewed together to form a work that insinuates itself into the reader and inspires the work of the next author. Freccero magnifies the most infinitesimal elements of that intricate construction to identify self-similar parts, revealing the full breadth of the great poem. Using this same technique, Freccero then turns to later giants of literature- Petrarch, Machiavelli, Donne, Joyce, and Svevo-demonstrating how these authors absorbed these smallest parts and reproduced Dante in their own work. In the process, he confronts questions of faith, friendship, gender, politics, poetry, and sexuality, so that traveling with Freccero, the reader will both cross unknown territory and reimagine familiar faces, swimming always in Dante's wake"--

Edition

First edition

General notes

Includes bibliographical references and index

Contents

Shipwreck in the Prologue -- The Portrait of Francesca : Inferno 5 -- Epitaph for Guido -- The Eternal Image of the Father -- Allegory and Autobiography -- In the Wake of the Argo on a Boundless Sea -- The Fig Tree and the Laurel -- Medusa and the Madonna of Forlì : Political Sexuality in Machiavelli -- Donne's "Valediction : Forbidding Mourning" -- Zeno's Last Cigarettex

Uniform title: Essays. Selections
Extended title: In Dante's wake : reading from medieval to modern in the Augustinian tradition / John Freccero ; edited by Danielle Callegari and Melissa Swain

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Divina commedia Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 LITERARY CRITICISM / European / Italian

author: Freccero, John
subject: Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
editor: Callegari, Danielle
editor: Swain, Melissa