The Cambridge Companion to Dante's 'Commedia'

Description

This newly commissioned volume presents a focused overview of Dante's masterpiece, the Commedia, offering readers of today wide-ranging insights into the poem and its core features. Leading scholars discuss matters of structure, narrative, language and style, characterization, doctrine, and politics, in chapters that make their own contributions to Dante criticism by raising problems and questions that call for renewed attention, while investigating contextual concerns as well as the current state of criticism about the poem. The Commedia is also placed in a variety of cultural and historical contexts through accounts of the poem's transmission and reception that explore both its contemporary influence and its continuing legacy today. With its accessible approach, its unstinting focus on the poem and its attention to matters that have not always received adequate critical assessment, this volume will be of value to all students and scholars of Dante's great poem.

Zygmunt Guido Baranski is Serena Professor of Italian Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and Notre Dame Chair of Dante and Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Among his publications are 'Sole nuovo luce nuova'. Saggi sul rinnovamento culturale in Dante (1996), Dante e i segni (2000), 'Chiosar con altro testo'. Leggere Dante nel Trecento (2001) and with Lino Pertile Dante in Context (Cambridge, 2015). Simon Gilson is Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Magdalen College. He is the author of Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 2005) and Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy: Florence, Venice and the 'Divine Poet' (Cambridge, 2018).