Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century ─ Nationality, Identity, and Appropriation

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.

Aida Audeh is Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Studio Arts & Art History at Hamline University, Minnesota. She has published widely on French artists' interest in Dante in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with articles appearing in such publications as Annali d'Italianistica, Dante Studies, Studies in Medievalism, and the Journal of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University. She is a contributing author to Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Reception, Portrayal, Popularization (Bern: Peter Lang) and to Dante in France (Florence: Le Lettere.

Nick Havely is Professor of English & Related Literature at the University of York, UK. His main research interests are in late medieval literature and in Anglo-Italian literary relations. His earlier books included Chaucer's Boccaccio: Sources for Troilus and the Knight's and Franklin's Tales (an anthology of translations, 1980, 2nd edition 1992); and editions of The House of Fame (1994) and Chaucer's Dream Poetry (1997). His work on Dante and his reception includes a number of recent books: Dante's Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney (1998); Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the 'Commedia' (2004, reissued in paperback by Cambridge University Press in 2008); the Dante volume in the Blackwell Guides to Literature series (2007). He is also currently working on a study of Dante in the English-Speaking World, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present which is contracted with Oxford University Press.