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In much extant scholarship, Dante is either misused as the prophet of the modern Italian nation-state or dismissed as a naive imperialist. This paper steers clear of both these characterizations and gives serious consideration to Dante’s own understanding of nationhood. I examine the construction of language and national community in De vulgari eloquentia and then place Dante’s idea of the nation in the context of his argument for world government in Monarchia. Grappling with the received view that for Dante, as for Aristotle, language is inherently political, the paper suggests that Dante’s nation is first and foremost a kind of psychological bond arising from the experience and use of common language; it is not embodied in political-juridical institutions, nor is it a suitable sphere for human self-realization through civic discourse and participation. The recovery of Dante’s ‘non-political’ understanding of the nation cautions against a blanket dismissal of premodern ideas of the nation and offers a more nuanced perspective on language, national identity, and the future of nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The constitutional monarchy of present-day Britain hardly seems the same sort of institution as fourteenth-century feudal kingdoms, but Dante’s Monarchia (c. 1313) and Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1872) share fundamental assumptions about what the purpose and strengths of monarchy are. In the Monarchia, Dante lays out the essential attributes of monarchy that endure even today: authority, impartiality, and unity. Dante values and promotes monarchy as final arbiter of conflicts, sole just judge without cupidity, and unifying will. More than 550 years later, Bagehot, despite his distrust concerning the Crown’s actual effectiveness, conceives of monarchy in surprisingly similar terms. The monarch is ‘the regulating wheel of our Constitution’, an authority outside and above partisan politics, and the ‘dignified’, ‘intelligible’, unifying element of government. In both cases, the monarch functions as the government’s source of impartial, unifying authority – whether monarch or Parliament ultimately wields that authority. The broad outlines of monarchy are surprisingly similar for both writers, suggesting a basic continuity in the conceptualization of monarchy from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century (and beyond) and an abiding store of reserve symbolism within the monarchic concept that writers, thinkers, and politicians throughout those centuries are able to tap at will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with Innocent III's pontificate, participation in the crusades became increasingly interpreted as imitatio Christi patientis. Innocent III's crusade theology was revived by later pontiffs and became ingrained in the collective imagination through preaching. This article shows how Dante draws on thirteenth-century crusade theology in his depiction of the cross of Mars, with special attention paid to imitatio Christi. Dante's rendering of his inner sacrifice (Par. xiv, 88–93) foreshadows the apparition of the cross and appears to have been influenced by the imagery of the crusader's vow as found in contemporary ecclesiastical documents. In these texts, crusaders are frequently depicted as participating in an inner sacrifice prompted by the fire of caritas that recalls Christ's own sacrifice. Reading Paradisoxiv-xv in light of this context – and with an awareness of the significance of Cacciaguida's placement in the same heaven – allows us to explore Dante's self-representation as a miles Christi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have often acknowledged Dante's influence on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. During the conflict in Northern Ireland, Dante's political and linguistic thinking showed Heaney a way of cultural reconciliation between the British and Gaelic traditions. From the early 1970s to the late 1990s, political (dis)harmony, linguistic unity, faith and poetics are some of his major themes, often explored through the reworking of passages from the Commedia. After the end of the Troubles in 1998, Dante's poetry may have taken on a new significance for the Irish author. This article therefore aims to explore Dantean intertextuality in Heaney's first peacetime collection, Electric Light (2001). Through the revival of settings, themes and motifs (particularly in the remake of 'Guido, i' vorrei'), Dante's presence seems to act as an analytical lens that shapes the poetic self, filters his literary experience, and redefines descriptive imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a law and humanities-based methodology to critique the binary distinction between remembering and forgetting that often features in law and policy. Using the right to be forgotten as a case study, the paper argues that such a distinction conceals the many ways that remembering and forgetting are intrinsically connected. In particular, a binary distinction understands forgetting as not remembering. But forgetting can also take the form of enlightened remembering: a deliberate choice to think differently about the past, an attempt to remember it in more positive or constructive ways. Drawing on insights from Dante's Divine Comedy, the paper pursues a normative argument about the value of enlightened remembering and then assesses the implications for legal discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nel 1865 la letterata tedesca Anna Vivanti-Lindau lascia la sua abitazione londinese per compiere un viaggio nel Mediterraneo assieme al marito Anselmo. Tappa fondamentale del tour è Firenze, dove la letterata, grande estimatrice di Dante, si reca con l'intento di assistere alle celebrazioni del seicentenario dantesco. Nel suo resoconto di viaggio A Journey to Crete, Costantinople, Naples and Florence. Three Months Abroad, Vivanti-Lindau rievoca il soggiorno fiorentino, offrendo un report del festival dantesco. Riflettendo la ricezione ottocentesca politico-risorgimentale di Dante, ella individua nell'autore della Commedia il padre e profeta dell'Unità italiana e, insieme, il simbolo di una libertà che andava oltre i confini del territorio italiano. Il presente contributo propone una lettura analitica delle pagine del Journey dedicate al seicentenario, contestualizzandole nel quadro della fortuna ottocentesca di Dante nel periodo in cui si muove Vivanti-Lindau, con particolare attenzione alla ricezione britannica del poeta negli anni a cavallo dell'unificazione italiana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nel 1865 la letterata tedesca Anna Vivanti-Lindau lascia la sua abitazione londinese per compiere un viaggio nel Mediterraneo assieme al marito Anselmo. Tappa fondamentale del tour è Firenze, dove la letterata, grande estimatrice di Dante, si reca con l'intento di assistere alle celebrazioni del seicentenario dantesco. Nel suo resoconto di viaggio A Journey to Crete, Costantinople, Naples and Florence. Three Months Abroad, Vivanti-Lindau rievoca il soggiorno fiorentino, offrendo un report del festival dantesco. Riflettendo la ricezione ottocentesca politico-risorgimentale di Dante, ella individua nell'autore della Commedia il padre e profeta dell'Unità italiana e, insieme, il simbolo di una libertà che andava oltre i confini del territorio italiano. Il presente contributo propone una lettura analitica delle pagine del Journey dedicate al seicentenario, contestualizzandole nel quadro della fortuna ottocentesca di Dante nel periodo in cui si muove Vivanti-Lindau, con particolare attenzione alla ricezione britannica del poeta negli anni a cavallo dell'unificazione italiana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay shows how the most comprehensive sixteenth-century printed collection of pre-Petrarchan lyric poetry, printed by the Giunti press in Florence in 1527 and known as the 'Giuntina delle rime', was conceived as a Dantean collection. The article argues that the 'Giuntina' can be understood in relation to a Florentine context that reacted in opposition to Bembo's codification, in his seminal dialogue Prose nelle quali si ragiona della volgar lingua (1525), of Petrarch and Boccaccio as supreme models for poetry and prose, and his devaluing Dante. This reaction led to the promotion of Dante's lyric poetry through a collection printed by the leading Florentine publishing house. The essay presents new evidence to show that the original programme of revaluing Dante that lies behind the collection and its scope seem to have undergone a transformation, which obscured the force of that re-evaluation in the final print of the 1527 anthology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Purgatorio xv and XVII, Dante depicts the pilgrim's inner visions produced without direct sensory input, which, paradoxically, lead to some of the most extravagantly multisensory descriptions in the second canticle of the Commedia. This article argues for the centrality of the cantos for understanding the visionary dimension of Dante's work by examining how Purg. XV and XVII meditate on the differences and overlaps between everyday and extraordinary perception. First, I examine Dante's depiction of the faculties of imaginativa and fantasia, involved both in ordinary and visionary sensation. Second, I explore how the cantos portray the ecstatic dimension of Dante's experience. Finally, I analyse how Dante uses multisensory language in individual visions so as to reflect on the complexity of perceptual layers in visionary experiences and to appeal to readers who think with, and through, their senses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I offer an architectonic of what Carl Schmitt calls the "antechamber of power from Friedrich Schiller, through Franz Kafka, to Walter Benjamin. To summarize my argument, I contend that the "antechamber of power" may always have been a supplementary space within the conceptual imaginary of sovereignty, but Schiller, Kafka, Benjamin, and Schmitt re-imagine it as the privileged space of an originary partage, sharing or division of power. If Jean Bodin defines sovereign power as "indivisible," I instead trace the self-division of sovereignty into what Jacques Derrida famously calls "plus d'un" places of power. In a series of readings of philosophical, historical, and literary representations of the antechamber, I show how the allegedly private chamber of power occupied by the sovereign alone constitutively divides or itself into a series of new political antechambers occupied by a new class of political bodies: Schiller's counsellor, Kafka's bureaucrat, Benjamin's clerk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moments of visual fixation appear throughout the Commedia. Reconstructing their connotations in relation to contemporary discourses on sight, this article argues that, as well as a literary trope, Dante's depictions of fixing the gaze function as a metaliterary device, an invitation to the reader's critical eye that, when interrupted, draws attention to the multiple cultures of gazing circulating at the time – from erotic obsession to contemplative ecstasy via visionary philosophical and theological inquiry. The roots of the trope are traced in Dante's rime and analysed in key episodes of the Commedia, including the dream of the Siren (Purgatorioxix), Dante's 'too fixed' gaze (Purgatorioxxiii), and the climatic gazes pilgrim and guide turn to God in Paradiso. By encouraging the reader to fulfil the poet's vision in her imagination, the fixed gaze, and its frequent interruption, emerges as a uniquely suitable trope for negotiating the representational challenges of transcendental topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the question of why M figures in the names of all of Beckett's major characters. I connect M to the word murmuring, which proliferates in his work, and I claim that Beckett was influenced by a passage in Dante's Purgatorio, in which each face in a group of penitents is inscribed with the letter M. With a rounded eye socket below each arch, the faces of the penitents spell omo or man. I argue that M stands for man – not the humanist form of man that existed for Dante, but rather a ruined figure that is adequate to this moment. Throughout, I engage with critical approaches to Beckett that attempt to connect the posthumanism suggested in his work with the new form of ethics – and of love – that it makes possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud's understanding of science allowed no origin for commitment to ethical values except via the superego. Recently, some psychoanalysts have found a more persuasive source in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In this paper, using in particular Viviane Chetrit-Vatine's notion of "matricial space," I attempt to look further at the implications of Levinas's idea of "transcendence," not as something special but as the ordinary horizon of seriously-held ethical values. To work as such, it must involve an affective dimension. Referencing Derrida's Adieu for Levinas, I discuss this in terms of different meanings of the word "love," in particular a certain sort of love for the unique "being" of the other, rather than for his or her "doing." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I use the notion of fertility to examine what is left of Erasmus Darwin's influence on Percy Shelley in his last, unfinished poem, 'The Triumph of Life'. My aim is to shed light on Shelley's use of pageantry in this poem in a new way, bearing in mind Darwin's frequent use of botanical pageants in The Loves of the Plants and in The Temple of Nature, that is, poems which notoriously influenced Shelley in Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley's pageant in 'The Triumph of Life' is the enactment of the 'mutiny within' (l. 213), which is opposed to the dominion of love in Prometheus Unbound and to Darwin's idea that good outbalances evil (The Temple of Nature, IV, 135–45). While on the surface Shelley ironically reverses the positive connotations of fertility which characterize the Darwinian botanical pageant, he nonetheless preserves this fertility metaphorically, resorting to the pageant as a metaphor generative of poetic wonders which can awaken the readers from Life's deadening 'mist of familiarity'. I conclude by arguing that what proves most fertile in this poem is ultimately Shelley's reworking and revitalizing of a hackneyed metaphor – that of the pageant itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on Dante's declaration that he attended 'the schools of the religious orders' and the 'disputations of the philosophizers' (Cvo II. xii. 7), this article sheds light on the unedited disputations of a Franciscan theologian, Peter of Trabibus, in the Florentine convent of Santa Croce (1295–96) and analyses the information available to a layman who attended these disputations as an auditor. The article then argues that, beginning in the Vita nova, Dante resemanticised commonplaces contemporaneously discussed and cited in these 'schools'. More precisely, it examines Dante's quotation of an Aristotelian sententia in VN XLI considering this quotation's use in the Santa Croce environment (including in Trabibus's disputations). This analysis helps show how Dante attempted to provide his prosimetrum with a specific theological substratum and chose to apply a theological concept discussed in the scholastic environment of Florence to a literary work in the vernacular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Il pastiche gaddiano è un fenomeno particolarmente complesso, poiché stravolge tanto gli elementi linguistici quanto quelli iconografici della tradizione letteraria contaminandoli e, di fatto, riscrivendoli. Un esempio di questo fenomeno è certamente la riscrittura dei tòpoi della tradizione lirica amorosa che l'Ingegnere compie ribaltando i canoni dello stilnovismo – che già nei secoli precedenti erano mutati dando vita ai rifacimenti di maniera –, attraverso la deformazione dell'immagine di Amore e della domina angelicata. Partendo dalla lettura di alcuni passi tratti da articoli, racconti e romanzi, l'intento di questo saggio è sottolineare come, mediante la manipolazione dei tòpoi canonici dello stilnovismo, Gadda pervenga a delineare una propria dichiarazione di poetica in una commistione di toni tragici, umoristici e caricaturali. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, the world's fourth-largest gaming company, Electronic Arts, released an action-adventure video game called Dante's Inferno. In the game, a weaponised, crusader Dante hacks and slashes his way through nine infernal circles to rescue his Beatrice, held captive by Satan in the pit of Hell. The game has sold a million copies, rates in the top quartile at review site Metacritic, and is critically acclaimed for its visual design. Dante scholarship, by contrast, has largely registered incredulity. This article takes the example of recent digital remediations of Inferno as a basis to explore what constitutes a 'faithful' remediation of Dante's poem, and why; asking questions such as: How do we evaluate the effects of the original text; that is, what it 'is' or 'does'? What conventions and mechanics of the original medium does the artefact depend upon? How can the effects invited or facilitated by one medium be translated into another? And: What constitutes 'fidelity' to the original work? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article carries out a close, comparative reading of two modern illuminated editions of the Vita nova by an Arts and Crafts artist, namely Phoebe Anna Traquair (1902) and a London-based art professional, Evelyn Paul (1916). After a short reconstruction of the historical and social context fostering the revival of illumination in mid-to-late Victorian Britain, the article unpacks the inner mechanism of pictorial, decorative, and typographical mediation that the two illuminators designed to translate the verbal sign and convey a distinctive visual interpretation of the libello. It considers how their editions introduced the 'elite arts of poetry' and manuscript illumination within the intellectual and economic reach of the middle-class mass public seeking cultural cultivation. It ponders how these popular artefacts mediated Dante's book of poetry for a whole new reading public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue explores what it means to mediate a cultural artefact across forms, times, and disciplines. Using the works of Dante as a shared case study, the articles analyse different modes of mediation – rewriting, adaptation, illustration, translation, and modes of authorial mediation – as evident in the seven centuries of critical, creative, and readerly response to Dante's works, especially, but not exclusively, his Commedia. This introduction indicates sources and implications for 'mediation' as it is articulated across the issue: from Roland Barthes, Gabriele D'Annunzio and contemporary videogames to medieval and modern illuminated manuscripts and illustrations. We draw out the underlying connections between Dante's own role as mediator and expectations for mediation of his works, as in his self-commentary, his frequent addresses to readers (contemporary and future) and the multiple media invoked in his writings and the ways in which subsequent mediators of Dante have responded to these calls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes Owen's series of thirty-four completed illustrations for the Inferno and six illustrations from her unfinished Purgatorio series as a model of 'im-mediation'. In these images, the shift across media and time functions to collapse spectatorial distance between reader and text. Bowe reads this process as a paratextual one, making use of Genette's category for forms of extra-textual, mediating material, to engage with the dynamic relationship between these illustrations, Dante's Commedia, and the paratexts that it has accrued in the seven centuries since his death. The article argues that the unique first-person pilgrimage depicted in these illustrations allows for a new kind of profoundly affective, and shared, act of reading, while also demonstrating a critically-engaged interpretive drive grounded in the history of Dante illustration and commentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Vat.lat.4776 (c. 1390–1400), line drawings, of particularly high-quality draughtsmanship, accompany Paradisoi–xi. Although Christ does not in any straightforward sense participate in the narrative of Paradisoi–xi, the majority of the drawings contain a small head and neck of Christ enclosed in a nimbus, strongly reminiscent of the devotional iconography of the Veronica or Holy Face. The images explore one of the central questions in the Commedia: how the divine is present in, or mediated by, human encounters. I investigate how, in different ways, in both the images and Dante's text (here focusing on Dante's 'in' neologisms in Paradisoix and on Paradisoxiv), Christ is understood as the reality that allows humans to share in a capacity for relatedness that is not bound by normal spatiotemporal limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I consider the reception of Dante by the twentieth-century French theorist and writer Roland Barthes. Barthes did not otherwise evince much interest in Italian literature, in poetry, nor indeed in the Middle Ages. Dante is therefore exceptional in Barthes's writings, and present particularly in the late Barthes and in texts written after the death of Barthes's mother. Most striking is Barthes's expressed intention around this time to write a novel that would bear the same title as Dante's youthful prosimetrum: Vita Nova. I reflect on why Barthes should have turned to Dante at this point, thinking especially about the mediators between the two, including critics (Jean-Michel Gardair) and translators (Alexandre Masseron, André Pézard). More generally, I also examine figures of mediation within Dante's own work, in particular the guide figure, the book-as-guide, and the screen lady, the first two of which were admired by Barthes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we draw attention to the expansive and crucial presence of Dante in two particular stories of Primo Levi's Vizio di forma, the linked tales 'Lavoro Creativo' and 'Nel Parco'. These stories imagine an idyllic afterlife realm for famous literary characters, and so are of course ripe for reading through the lens of Dante's Limbo. But we argue that there is still more to be found by expanding the scope of our inquiry to more of the Commedia, particularly in considering the dynamic between souls in Dante's Purgatory and Levi's appreciation of the scientific aspects of Dante's writings. Such a move allows for a fuller appreciation of the relationship between Primo Levi and Dante, showing how the Turinese writer creates a unique space for himself through his acts of rewriting, appropriating, and adapting Dante. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dante's inclusion of Statius among De Vulgari Eloquentia's catalogue of Latin poets and his use of Statius's Thebaid in Convivio III–IV are well-known. Yet critical literature overlooks the significant development in Dante's treatment of Statius over the course of the two opere minori. This article argues that Dante's qualitatively different approach to Statius between De Vulgari Eloquentia, Convivio III, and Convivio IV. xxv both sheds light on Dante's reading programme in exile and acts as a prelude to Dante's engagement with Statius in Inferno and creation of Stazio-character in Purgatorio. Close analysis of Dante's changing engagement with Statius between De Vulgari Eloquentia, Convivio III and IV. xxv suggests Dante first encountered Statian epic in extracted form, stimulating Dante's interest such that he read the Thebaid in entirety. Dante's use of Statius in Convivio thus signals the beginning of Dante's intense engagement with Statian epic that culminates in the Commedia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the presence of Dante in a sermon of the Quadragesimale printed under the name of Johannes Gritsch, one of the main sermon bestsellers in late medieval Europe. Albeit quite in plain sight, this text that translates into Latin and comments extensively on Paradiso 33. 1–9 has been completely overlooked by sermon and Dante scholars. By analysing this Dantean passage and by contextualizing it within the Quadragesimale, the article underlines its relevance within the broader phenomenon of the use of the Commedia in late medieval preaching in and outside Italy. On this latter aspect, the sermon under investigation is a game changer. While a few German preachers who used sermons composed in Italy that included references to Dante were already known, this time we encounter a German Franciscan friar who, when composing sermons meant first and foremost for a German audience, engaged with a passage of the Commedia. He did so probably knowing nothing about Dante, perhaps not even his name. As a result, mediated by preachers and detached from its original cultural context, a fragment of the Commedia found its way on a prodigious journey across Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article sets out to show the ideological significance of the quotations from Vergil, Lucan, Horace, Homer, and Ovid found in Vita Nova 16 [XXV], the celebrated passage where Dante cites these poets as examples of personification in classical literature. In the quotations from Vergil's Aeneid, Aeolus and Juno speak to each other, and Apollo speaks to the Trojans. In his framing of the quotations, Dante appears implicitly to regard pagan deities like Aeolus, Juno, and Apollo as inanimate things, raising the question as to why the author of the Vita Nova understood pagan gods in terms of poetic tropes. Focusing on the Vergilian quotations, this essay argues that Servius's commentary to the Aeneid represents one of the major sources that might have led Dante to construe pagan deities as rhetorical personifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lo studio analizza l'enciclica di Benedetto XV dedicata a Dante dal titolo In Praeclara Summorum. Il testo papale, scritto nel 1921 in occasione del sesto centenario della morte del Poeta, eleva Dante, nell'Europa devastata del primo dopoguerra, a guida morale, sociale e politica dei popoli straziati dalla follia bellica. Il mio obiettivo è quello di capire le profonde ragioni che spinsero papa Benedetto XV a trasformare l'Alighieri in mistagogo e teorico politico per l'uomo contemporaneo, col potere di rigenerare spiritualmente soprattutto i giovani e giovanissimi dell'Europa uscita dalla Prima guerra mondiale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I suggest that the character of Beatrice in Dante's Commedia should be understood as a theologian, even though her claim to such status relies not on an established historical authority – on written treatises, sermons, works, or reputation – but rather on the nature of the particular person which Dante constructed over his poetic career. The article accordingly reads Beatrice through two major theologians: Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). As case studies, the two present rich opportunities for understanding Dante's own views about theology, but by seeing them through the prism of Beatrice, we can understand more fully the reasons why neither is sufficient for the pilgrim's salvation. Beatrice both incorporates and departs from their teachings and authority. In her lover/beloved relationship with the pilgrim, theology becomes not personified, as has often been the claim, but personalised, requiring a person-to-person realisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pope Benedict XVI's resignation from the See of Rome, announced on 11 February 2013, has been interpreted as an eschatological gesture, most famously by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. This article reconsiders the evidence of eschatological thinking in the work of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and revisits the declaration of resignation of 2013 considering the precedent set by Pope Celestine V's abdication in 1294. It examines the ecclesiological context of this event and how this context is reflected in Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's work. It concludes that Benedict XVI's resignation cannot be understood without acknowledging his own interpretation of Saint Bonaventure's moderate eschatology, ecclesiology, and theology of history. While focusing on the Church, the article also investigates the political reflections of Celestine V's abdication and its Bonaventurian background. Via Dante and the reception of his work in the twentieth-century German-speaking context, it finally turns to the ways in which Benedict XVI associated the world with his resignation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to understand further the working of values in ethics and religion. Its premise is that the psyche is organized by its internal objects, and that understanding the effective working of values therefore requires understanding the relevant internal objects. It begins with a brief outline of the history of internal objects in the thought of Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Loewald, and suggests that they are best thought of as "phenomenological" in nature, meaning that, whether conscious or unconscious, they appear in the mind without an enduring substrate. Using the thought of Loewald and of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in particular, it suggests that the functioning of "allegory" offers an important avenue to understanding how certain internal objects act to organize the psyche hierarchically on a basis of values including ethical ones. "Religious objects" may then be understood as a subclass of "allegorical objects", acting analogously to Levinas's "face of the other" and experienced as giving access to "transcendent" (commanding) values. Such values are not adequately described by traditional accounts of a superego and require a deepening of the psychoanalytic dialogue with philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses some of the forms of interaction between academic philology, the poetic avant-garde, and the public, demonstrating the role played by the material book in shaping the cultural impact of Dante's lyric corpus on twentieth-century culture. A survey of the historical treatment of Dante's lyric poetry between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lays the foundation for re-evaluating the earliest reception of Contini's edition of Dante's Rime and particularly its parallel genesis with Montale's Le Occasioni, resulting in two uncannily similar books of poetry published in the autumn of 1939: Contini's hermeneutics served as a hypotext for Montale's 1930s poetry, while Montale formed a key part of the intellectual milieu in which Contini was himself immersed. Through hermeneutics, but also through publishing strategies and personal relationships, Contini was able to portray Dante as a contemporary, avant-garde author, thus inspiring productive readings of medieval poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the paradoxical relation of the literary work of the Brazilian author João Guimarães Rosa to the field of world literature. On the one hand, this work is distinguished by an insistent worlding function, insofar as it is a prime example of a regionalist modernism that transcends its local and regionally specific context into universal, global, and metaphysical dimensions of meaning. On the other hand, the author has created a virtually unique linguistic idiom that requires heightened concentration on the part of the reader and poses enormous challenges for translation. The article argues that this paradox may be usefully discussed by way of the category of the vernacular, as it derives from Dante's treatise De vulgari eloquentia. The vernacular reshaping of the language emphasises the mutability of the world and the striving of the literary discourse to reconnect itself to some sense of poetic immediacy. Matters of linguistic resistance and self-conscious, meta-linguistic or meta-translational passages will be analysed insofar as they serve the literary exhibition of the vernacular as something that courts yet is already removed from oral/popular immediacy. Comments on a long novella (O recado do morro) and an epic novel (Grande Sertão: Veredas), both from 1956, explore the relation between the word, the vernacular, and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Playing on Apter's 'translational transnationalism' and on the tension between the national and global, this article asks what it means to think translationally and transnationally in the context of Italian studies. The three authors explore both the 'transnational' and 'translational' by focusing on issues of methodology and shifts in objects of analysis. They present the translation/reception of Dante as a particularly apposite case study in the complex interplay between the two concepts and discuss the questions that the large project, 'Transnationalizing Modern Languages' (2014-2017), has sought to address. The relational link between the national and the transnational is explored in ways that challenge antithetical or mutually exclusive perspectives, shoring up their 'contrapuntal' tension. By observing the interplay between the national and the transnational/translational, this article explores the negotiation of identity and diversity which underlies all forms of cultural production and/or exchange and which is at the centre of pedagogical practice in Modern Languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following essay is a modified version of an invited presentation given in Florence, Italy in May 2017. It builds on and extends some of the previous psychoanalytic and multidisciplinary studies of Dante's Divine Comedy as a "psychoanalysis of the Middle Ages" that greatly contributed to the incipient changes of the cultural episteme. The paper will explore and elaborate the continued relevance of Dantian proto-psychoanalytic insight into the complex role of regression, destruction, transgression, and conflict in generating growth, expansion, and creativity, and the ways in which ethics and erotics intertwine in a complex path towards unity, within the context of his multivocal presubjective, intrasubjective, and intersubjective inquiry leading to psychic reorganization. The liminal nature of Dante's poetry, extending the symbolic and representational range in a way unprecedented in the vernacular literature of his time, vivifying and representing what is traditionally thought of as beyond representation, will also be considered in terms of its relevance to the contemporary psychoanalytic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the twilight of Arabic literary culture in thirteenth-century Sicily, poets writing in the vernacular Italian use the term "stanza," meaning a "dwelling," to refer to a lyric strophe. Since there is no precedent for this use of the term "stanza" to refer to poetry, I suggest that "stanza" presents as a calque for Arabic "bayt," meaning "dwelling" and a "unit of verse." To understand how the implied relation between poetry and architecture might frame new approaches to the scuola siciliana, I examine the imbrication of linguistic and built form in Arabic poetry. The qaṣīdah, the preeminent Arabic lyric, often begins with an evocation of an architectural ruin, the effaced "dār" or "bayt" of a departed beloved. I argue that her phantom form or "khayāl," haunting and taking the place of her ruined dwelling, articulates the fluidity of all apparently enduring structures and the performative power of poetry to delineate the real. Turning to the epistemological continuities between Arabic and Italian poetry, I study the relation between architecture, phantasms, and the theory of form in the work of Giacomo da Lentini, a poet-scribe in the court of Frederick II, concluding that the kinship between the qaṣīdah and sonnet subverts "Western" narratives of self-invention and cultural authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Dante's notion of 'discrezione' in Convivio I. xi, with the aim of highlighting the syncretic nature of the concept. It argues that Dante's discretion (from Latin discretio) relies upon both Aristotle and Cicero's ethical thought, thus reflecting the fluidity and the harmonising potential of the intellectual and civic culture in which Dante was immersed. This reading is thus situated within current discussion of Dante's intellectual formation within Florence, and beyond. It especially focuses on the mediating role played by Brunetto Latini's Tresor in relation to Dante's encounter with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics alongside Stoic traditions. This study also brings to light the ambivalence, and even rivalry, that seems to characterise Dante's relationship to his older master, after the poet's exile from Florence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between two fields of study, Italian Studies and Digital Humanities (DH), by documenting projects that employ digital or computational methods in the study of Italian language, literature, history, and the arts. In a complementary fashion, the author outlines the analytical questions of Italian scholars that have potential to advance inquiry in DH. A final section is devoted to contextualizing DH within the practice of Italian Studies at the institutional, program, and department levels by drawing on research of course offerings and a survey circulated in August 2017. The overall finding is that the area of overlap between DH and Italian Studies is intellectually rich, with increasing (yet still sparse) opportunities to develop specialization in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Across the River & Into the Trees" by Ernest Hemingway is presented. It outlines the characters and explores their symbolic significance. It examines a correlative of Colonel's spiritual anguish in the face of his imminent death and also mentions about spiritual pilgrimage and sense of guilt for the loss of his regiment along with the Christian virtue of self-sacrificial love. An overview of the story is also given.

This article examines Alexei F. Losev's attitude toward Renaissance literature and philosophy, primarily the legacy of Dante and Nicholas of Cusa. The author shows that Losev's study of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was connected not only with his interest in the fate of Neoplatonism or certain categories (such as "the One") but also with his historiosophy. At the same time, Losev's own studies prove to be very much in the spirit of the era in terms of its attention to the typology of culture (O. Spengler), on the one hand, and the study of medieval neoclassicism (neo-Thomism), on the other. Meanwhile, we can talk about the traditions of Nicholas of Cusa and of Dante in Losev's own creative work—both philosophical and artistic (his prose and poems of the 1930s-1940s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dance studies scholars have explored the interrelatedness of dance, text, and technology in productive ways. Reorienting such an approach toward a medieval perspective, this article focuses on how Dante poeticizes dance in Paradiso, the third section of his Commedia. I begin by exploring Paradiso's representations of technology and kinesthesia. Dante, I argue, converges clockwork and dance imagery and, in doing so, simulates the experience of sacred phenomena. Next, I examine the vernacular technologies of Dante's dance language, which demonstrate linguistic mastery, envision a just society, and articulate an ethical approach to love. Ultimately, I posit that Dante's rendering of dance in poetry overcomes the limits of verbal communication and formulates a moralizing discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay re-examines the role of Ovid in Dante’s Commedia, complementing the traditional comparisons between Dante’s verses and Ovid’s Latin texts with a different source of Ovidian influence: the references to the Latin poet in Italian vernacular lyric poetry. Finding several precedents for Dante’s treatment of Ovidian material in the Commedia in the poetry of his predecessors and contemporaries, this essay argues that Dante’s Ovidian sources consist of both Ovid’s Latin texts and Ovidian readings in vernacular lyric poetry. Through the analysis of a main feature of such vernacular readings, the evaluation of Ovid’s authority in matters of love in sonnet exchanges, I illustrate the vernacular roots of Dante’s reading of Ovid in the Commedia, and show how Dante draws on the Latin and vernacular Ovidian traditions to define his writing in the Commedia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma. While the film has received copious critical attention, most interpretations either focus on the physical and sexual violence depicted on screen or read the film as a simple metaphor for capitalist consumer culture. This article engages with Pasolini’s oft-neglected journalistic Scritti corsari (Corsair writings) to demonstrate the complex and often problematic nature of his critiques of capitalism, fully present in Salò as well. My reading of irony in Salò at once offers an understanding of the role of Pasolini’s citations of other texts in the film, explores his relationship to the work of Dante and of Ezra Pound, and examines how Pasolini anticipates certain strands of radical negativity in queer theory, particularly in the work of Lee Edelman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the medieval and classical antecedents of modern colonialism. In its first section, it focuses on Pisa’s medieval experience in order to contribute to a genealogy of colonial imaginings and practice. Unable to expand inland and surrounded by hostile polities, Pisa amassed a number of colonial possessions during the eleventh and twelfth century, primarily in Sardinia, but also in the Balearic Islands, North Africa, and in the Levant. Sidestepping the findings of an important debate about whether colonial phenomena in radically different eras can be seen as ‘continuous’ with their predecessors (both sides of this debate present convincing arguments that are consistent with their respective definitions - i.e. ‘the Ancients Greeks or Romans set up colonies’, ‘modern colonialism is entirely unprecedented’), this paper’s second section refers to settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination and outlines how it was practiced in classical antiquity. Each section is followed by an epilogue touching on the intellectual afterlives of the ‘empires’ outlined by each section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers what might first appear to be a minor theological problem in the major work of Dante’s mentor, and shows that it indeed poses a conundrum and a riddle to be solved. Taking up Augustine’s commentary on Christ’s three resurrection miracles – in the house, outside the gate, and in the sepulchre – I note that in hisTresorBrunetto retains the first of these locations but revises the second to “in the doorway of the house” and the third to “in the street.” Ruling out a traditional “source” for these deviations, I ask: Are these changes of scenery significant – a trivial memory lapse, subtly subversive, or ringing a change? Ultimately, I propose an underlying shift in perspective: from Augustinian biblical topography to a contemporary urban setting – an “update” from a late Classical to a medieval scene, from Hippo to Florence – an “urbanization” of the Augustinian “stages of sin” that gestures towards the streetscape of theVita nuova. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Translations of summary The power of Dante's Divine Comedy is unmistakable, but surprising in view of its theological structure and assumptions that are no longer current among most modern readers. This paper suggests that its power derives from the deep psychological truthfulness with which Dante deals with the painful personal crisis that underlies the poem and is his starting point. It attempts to clarify what may have constituted that crisis, and why the structure of the Comedy, and in particular its use of two guides, Virgil and Beatrice, who might be thought a somewhat incompatible pairing, point significantly to the nature of the solution Dante arrived at. In particular it suggests that the puzzling fictions to do with Statius in the Purgatorio are a clue to Dante's own difficulties in bridging the classical and Christian traditions, and that his highly original solution to these difficulties, by no means conforming to conventional Christian orthodoxy in the 13th/14th century, was needed with special urgency in a time of pervasive civil conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the characterization of blessed souls in Dante’s Commedia (1307-21) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (c. 1356-74) and Triumphi (c. 1352-74). It argues that eschatological realism - the detailed representation of souls in the afterlife - lies at the heart of these three works, each of which depicts a deceased beloved who now resides in Paradise. Dante’s Paradiso navigates a range of doctrinal and literary challenges to incorporate its blessed characters into the poem’s continuum of interlocutors. Although the Commedia culminates with a first-person, mystical experience, the structural importance of third-person voices to the canticle demonstrates the centrality of realist characterization to the overall project. Petrarch’s works, meanwhile, reject Dante’s broad and varied descriptions of beatitude but nonetheless assert a more restricted eschatological realism channelled through the interpersonal connection with Laura. The beloved’s combination of exemplarity and historicity sets up the paradigm that defines the other characters in Petrarch’s narrative, including the poetic ‘I’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carmelo Bene’s theatrical performances of classics such as Shakespeare were aimed at deconstructing these well-known texts in order to dismantle the straightjacket of their eternal, unchanging quality. This procedure allowed Bene to provide new ‘readings’ of Shakespeare as well as unexpected associations with the works of other poets and playwrights. In the case of his film version ofOthello(1979), Bene seems to accentuate a surprising cannibalistic undercurrent in the original, through textual, visual and oral emphases and small but significant translational changes. Bene’s performance of Othello is interestingly echoed by his rendition of Canto XXXIII of Dante’sInferno(1981). His cannibalistic reinterpretation (in form as well as in content, which means that he singles out possible clues to cannibalism in both cases and he does so by ‘cannibalizing’ the texts) of the tales of Othello and Ugolino suggests surprising parallels between these characters and their respective destinies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a close reading of the lyrical dramaAnd the Dogs Were Silent, and Aimé Césaire’s unique deployment of a Dantean imaginary. It argues, specifically, that Dante’s “symbolic process” in theCommediaprovides a metaphorical structure for the hero’s initiation in this work and for the poet’s articulation of a philosophy of postcolonial relationality. Showing how Dante’skatabasisis used to analogize the creative power of Césaire’s hellish abyss, it offers Édouard Glissant’s theory of Relation as a guiding framework to emphasize fluid connectivity in Césaire’s poetic project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the presence of a polarized thematic of icons and idols in the works of Dante and Petrarch. In Dante’sVita nuovaandCommedia, and in Petrarch’sCanzoniereand Latin letters, the Veronica —vera icon— of Christ is invoked in relation to the poet’s beloved, either as an analogous model or as a point of opposition. In the latter case, which applies both to Dante’s siren (inPurgatorioXIX) and to Petrarch’s Laura (particularly inRVF16), the presence of the Veronica can only properly be understood in contradistinction to the poetic idolatry which haunts each text. In particular, Laura is found to be an idol for three reasons: Petrarch’s worship of her name; doubts over her existence; and the Pygmalion myth that haunts Martini’s portrait of Petrarch’s beloved. For Petrarch, the only possible solution to the temptation of idolatry is a Dantean one, namely invocation of a further icon, the Virgin Mary (both inRVF366 and in his Testament), even if theCanzoniereis never fully able to forsake Laura. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article has two main aims. First, it assesses recent developments in Dante scholarship and calls into question the validity of some of the critical, historical, and methodological premises that these trends have fostered. Second, it proposes ways in which the study of the poet ought to be historically and methodologically more sensitive to the nuances and specificities of medieval culture than is generally the norm in Dante studies. To illustrate how such an approach might be articulated, the article focuses on the poet’s intellectual formation in Florence, especially around 1295, paying particular attention to Dante’s self-presentation inConvivioII. xii, to the nature of his possible relationship to the institutions of the mendicant orders, to his ties to Brunetto Latini, and to his knowledge of the Boethian and Aristotelian traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]