Keen, Catherine; (2025) The myth of Dante. In: Jossa, Stefano, (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Italian Literature. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.

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Abstract

This chapter explores uses of Dante’s work, name, and public figure in national and transnational discourses around Italian identity, from the fourteenth to twenty-first centuries. Beginning with self-mythologization, it notes how Dante embedded the mobility of exile and the radical vernacularity of the Commedia’s poetry into his own authorial representation. It next considers Dante’s reception up to the sixteenth century, reviewing how artistic, biographical, and literary commemorations established his literary canonicity, while accommodating divergent and sometimes polemical responses in contributions running from the age of Giotto and Boccaccio, up to Raphael and Machiavelli. The last section moves forward several centuries to examine how minoritized or marginalized communities within modern and contemporary Italy have problematized nation-centred accounts of Dante, exploring how deportee, refugee, and exophone writing re-energizes Dante’s myth to make it more collaborative and transnational in the context of changing Italian cultural identities and networks in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

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