Dante: A Very Short Introduction

Description

This Very Short Introduction examines all the major aspects of Dante's work, emphasizing the features that have made him such an important point of reference for modern writers and their readers. Exploring and explaining The Divine Comedy, they also discuss his life and poetry as well as issues of truth, humanity, politics, and religion.

• A clear and wide ranging exploration of Dante's work
• Uses a thematic approach to examine the challenges of his work, and his life, and works
• Places Dante within the context of his time
• Provides an in-depth exploration of The Divine Comedy and its meaning
• Part of the bestselling Very Short Introductions series - over seven million copies sold worldwide

About the Author(s)

Peter Hainsworth, Emeritus Fellow, Lady Margaret Hall Oxford, and David Robey, Emeritus Professor, University of Reading, and Emeritus Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford

Peter Hainsworth lectured in Italian at Hull and Kent Universities before moving to Oxford in 1979. He remained there until he retired in 2003. He has published widely on medieval and modern Italian literature, including Petrarch the Poet (Routledge, 1986). He reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

David Robey lectured in Italian at Oxford University before becoming Professor of Italian at Manchester and then Reading Universitties. He has published on 15th-century Italian humanism, language and style in Dante and Renaissance narrative poetry, the computer analysis of literature, and modern critical theory. He is the author of a computer-based study on Sound and Structure in Dante's 'Divine Comedy' (OUP, 2000), and an extensive data resource on Sound and Metre in Italian Narrative Verse. Peter Hainsworth and David Robey co-edited the Oxford Companion to Italian Literature (2002), and were joint authors of Italian Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2012).

Table of Contents

1:Introduction
2:Autobiography
3:Truth
4:Writing
5:Humanity
6:Politics
7:God
Further reading
Index

Reviews

"The authors are much to be praised for not allowing the brevity of their volume to undermine or unjustly foreclose what Dante's text leaves to his reader'a judgement and sensibilities." - Fortean Times, Heather Webb

"Swift-moving, decisive, sensitive and suggestive" - The Manchester Review

"The authors are much to be praised for not allowing the brevity of their volume to overdetermine or unjustly foreclose what Dante's text leaves to his reader's judgement and sensibilties." - Heather Webb, The Times Literary Supplement

"There is something almost uncanny about how this book makes the work of a long-dead poet from another culture come alive... this book imparts knowledge as well as encouraging us to find it ourselves." - Guardian, Nicholas Lezard

"this work deftly explores aspects of Dante that were variously enlightened" - Independent, Christopher Hirst