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The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It encompasses diverse approaches and spans several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, literary theory, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies.
List of contents
- Introduction. Dante Unbound: A Vulnerable Life and the Openness of Interpretation
- Part I: Texts and Textuality
- 1: Justin Steinberg: The author
- 2: Lina Bolzoni: Memory
- 3: Mary Carruthers: Reading
- 4: Martin Eisner: Materiality of the text and manuscript culture
- 5: Fabio Zinelli: The manuscript tradition, or on editing Dante
- 6: Luca Fiorentini: Commentary (both by Dante and on Dante)
- 7: Akash Kumar: Digital Dante
- Part II: Dialogues
- 8: Zygmunt G. Baranski: The Classics
- 9: Antonio Montefusco: Roman de la Rose
- 10: William Burgwinkle: Troubadours
- 11: Roberto Rea: Early Italian lyric
- 12: Fabian Alfie: Comic culture
- 13: Gervase Rosser: Visual culture
- Part III: Transforming Knowledge
- 14: Franziska Meier: Encyclopaedism
- 15: Natascia Tonelli: Medicine
- 16: Simon Gilson: Visual theory
- 17: Diego Quaglioni: The law
- 18: Tristan Kay: Politics
- 19: Pasquale Porro: Philosophy and theology
- 20: Alessandro Vettori: Religion
- 21: Elena Lombardi: Poetry
- Part IV: Space(s) and places
- 22: Giuliano Milani: Florence and Rome
- 23: Elisa Brilli: Civitas/Community
- 24: Karla Mallette: The Mediterranean
- 25: Brenda Deen Schildgen: The East
- 26: Johannes Bartuschat: Exile
- 27: Theodore J. Cachey, Jr.: Travelling/wandering/mapping
- 28: Peter Hawkins: Dante's other worlds
- Part V: A passionate selfhood
- 29: Manuele Gragnolati: Eschatological anthropology
- 30: Heather Webb: Language
- 31: Bernard McGinn: The mystical
- 32: Cary Howie: Bodies on fire
- Part VI: A non-linear Dante
- 33: Nicolò Crisafi: The master narrative and its paradoxes
- 34: Jennifer Rushworth: Conversion, palinody, traces
- 35: Francesca Southerden: The lyric mode
- 36: Teodolinda Barolini: Errancy: A brief history of Dante's Ferm Voler
- Part VII: Nachleben
- 37: Martin McLaughlin: Translations
- 38: Rossend Arqués Corominas: Dante and the performing arts
- 39: John David Rhodes: Dante on screen
- 40: Daniela Caselli: Modernist Dante
- 41: Lino Pertile: Dante and the Shoah
- 42: Jason Allen-Paisant: Dante in Caribbean poetics: Language, power, race
- 43: Gary Cestaro: Queering Dante
- 44: Marguerite Waller: A decolonial feminist Dante: Imperial historiography and gender
About the author
Manuele Gragnolati, Co-editor, is Professor of Medieval Italian Literature at Sorbonne Université, Associate Director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. He is the author of Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (2005) and Amor che move. Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante and Medieval Culture (2013), and the co-editor of several volumes, including Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages (2012) and Vita nova. Fiore. Epistola XIII (2018).
Elena Lombardi is Professor of Italian Literature at Oxford, and the Paget Toynbee Fellow at Balliol College. She is the author of The Syntax of Desire: Language and Love in Augustine, the Modistae and Dante (2007), The Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (2012), and Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante (2018).
Francesca Southerden is Associate Professor of Medieval Italian at Somerville College, Oxford. She has written several articles on Dante and Petrarch and is author of Landscapes of Desire in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni (2012). She is currently working on Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language.
Summary
The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante's formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. The volume is divided into seven sections: 'Texts and Textuality'; 'Dialogues'; 'Transforming Knowledge'; Space(s) and Places'; 'A Passionate Selfhood'; 'A Non-linear Dante'; and 'Nachleben'. It seeks to challenge the Commedia-centric approach (the conviction that notwithstanding its many contradictions, Dante's works move towards the great reservoir of poetry and ideas that is the Commedia), in order to bring to light a non-teleological way in which these works relate amongst themselves. Plurality and the openness of interpretation appear as Dante's very mark, coexisting with the attempt to create an all-encompassing mastership. The Handbook suggests what is exciting about Dante now and indicate where Dante scholarship is going, or can go, in a global context.
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I heartily recommend this volume as a true feast for the mind.
