ISBN : 9780199584628
This collection of essays by an international group of scholars offers an account of Dante's reception in a wide range of media: visual art, literature, theatre, cinema, and music, from the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth. It thus explores various appropriations and interpretations of his works and persona during the era of modernization in Europe, the United States, and beyond. It includes work by internationally recognized experts and a new generation of scholars in the field, and the eighteen essays are grouped in sections which relate both to themes and regions. The volume begins and ends by addressing Italy's reception of the national poet, and its other main sections show how a worldwide dialogue with Dante developed in France, Britain, Germany, the United States, Ireland, India, and Turkey. The whole collection demonstrates how this dialogue explicitly or implicitly informed the construction, recovery or re-definition of cultural identity among various nations, regions and ethnic groups during the 'long nineteenth century'. It not only aims at wide coverage of the period's voices and concerns, and includes discussion of well-known writers such as Ugo Foscolo, Giosue Carducci, Mary Shelley, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton and Ralph Waldo Emerson - along with a large number of significant but less familiar figures. It also emphasizes the importance of a multidisciplinary and multilingual approach to the subject of Dante and nineteenth-century nationalism, and it will thus be of interest to scholars and students in comparative literary and nineteenth-century studies, as well as to those with a general interest in cultural studies and the history of ideas.
List of Plates
Acknowledgments
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction
1. RISORGIMENTO: ITALIAN NATIONALITY AND IDENTITY
'Founders of Italian Literature': Dante, Petrarch. and National Identity in Ugo Foscolo
Politics vs. Literature - The Myth of Dante and the Italian National Identity
Dante and the Creation of the poeta vate in Nineteenth-Century Italy
Reading Dante in Nineteenth-Century Italy
'The Holy Stone where Dante Sat': Memory and Oblivion
Politics and Performance: Gustavo Modena's dantate
2. NATIONAL INTERESTS AND APPROPRIATIONS
Dufau's La Mort d'Ugolin: Dante, Nationalism, and French Art, c.1800
Dante and Fabre D'Olivet: the Pilgrim Romeo and the Construction of an Occitan Chant Royal
Dante and British Romantic Women Writers: Writing the Nation, Defining National Culture
Dante's Beatrice and Victorian Gender Ideology
3. EMERGING POWERS
Dante's Long Road to the German Library: Literary Reception from Early Romanticism to the Late Nineteenth Century
Charles Eliot Norton and the Rationale for American Dante Studies
Emerson, Dante, and American Nationalism
Dante Abolitionist and Nationalist in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of Cordelia Ray
4. RECOVERING/ RE-DEFINING IDENTITIES
Lord Charlemont's Dante and Irish Culture: A Whig interpretation of Dante at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
Dante and the Bengali Renaissance
The Reception of Dante in Turkey through the Long Nineteenth Century
EPILOGUE: DANTE AND EARLY ITALIAN CINEMA
The 1911 Milano-Films Inferno and Italian Nationalism
APPENDIX
Dante and Nineteenth-Century Music (listing and selective bibliography)
INDEX