Rushworth, Jennifer; (2024) The Networks of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In: Jossa, Stefano, (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Italian Literature. Oxford University Press

Text Rushworth_Dante Divine Comedy_OHIL_for_publication downloaded 26 September 2024.pdf Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 20 September 2026. Download (298kB)

Abstract

This chapter explores the challenges of reading and responding to Dante’s Divine Comedy in terms of a tension between completeness and fragmentation. It first offers a brief introduction to the poem and presents Roland Barthes’s typology of the Comedy as different kinds of book: Origin, Key, Summa, Guide. It then analyzes contrasting examples in the Comedy’s reception in light of these categories. George Eliot’s citation of lines from Inferno V presents a characteristic nineteenth-century case of a highly selective, mediated Dante. In contrast, Giorgio Pressburger’s twenty-first-century trilogy offers an incredibly close Dantean rewriting, even including imitation of the Dante commentary tradition. The chapter hypothesizes that fragmentation and completion might map onto a parallel contrast between non-Italian and Italian responses to Dante, but the conclusion works to unpick these oppositions by drawing on transnational Italian studies and highlighting the necessary coexistence of whole and fragment within the form of the encyclopedia.

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