A handbook to Dante 346 Pages.

Excerpt from A Handbook to Dante Last summer, while preparing some lectures on Dante, I was struck with the fact that there did not exist in English any Handbook to Dante, any book calculated to furnish intending students of his works with the necessary preparatory information, historical, bibliographical, biographical, and literary. My first impulse was to attempt the compilation of such a book, which seemed called for by the daily-increasing interest in the great Christian poet; but, on reflection, it seemed to me that I might obtain a better result, by translating some Italian or German manual, and making such additions as would suit it to the needs of English-speaking students. This I have now done, having selected for translation the Dante-Manual which finds most favor in Italy, which is the work of one of the best Dante-scholars of our time, and which seems to me almost a model for a Handbook. My own additions, which, for the most part, take the form of foot-notes, included in brackets, will, it is hoped, add to the value of the work, and supplement certain one-sided views held by Dr. Scartazzini. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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.