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Around 1800, German Romantics fixated on Dante's
Divine Comedy as a model for the creation of a new mythology of reason. This book traces that fixation across Romantic and Neo-Romantic texts, showing how the Romantic Dante cult in fact generated ominous amalgams of art, myth, and fascism in the twentieth century.
List of contents
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
A Note on Translation
Introduction: Orienting Romanticism
Part I: Romanticism
1. Discovering Dante and Theorizing Myth: The Schlegel Brothers and the Origins of the Romantic Project
2. Schelling, Novalis, and the Legitimation of a Dantean Mythology
3. Goethe's Dantean Mythologies of the Self and of the World
Part II: Neo-Romanticism
4. Trespassing the Sign: The Mad Flight of Gerhart Hauptmann
5. Abolishing History: New Dantean Germanies in Rudolf Borchardt and Stefan George
6. Thomas Mann and the Demythologization of Dante
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
DANIEL DiMASSA is an assistant professor of German at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Summary
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, no task seemed more urgent to German Romantics than the creation of a new mythology. But what would a new mythology look like? Only one model sufficed, according to Friedrich Schlegel: Dante’s Divine Comedy.
