Believing in Dante
Truth in Fiction

Tackles specific issues in the Divine Comedy that seem particularly alien to modern ways of thinking and renders them compelling.

Alison Cornish (Author)

9781316515068, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 June 2022

276 pages
22.2 x 14.4 x 1.9 cm, 0.44 kg

'Alison Cornish rings the changes on the question of belief in Dante - belief in God, in Christian 'revelation,' in the Commedia's veracity, in how what characters believe determines who and where they are for eternity. She offers a bracing view of the poem as an adventure in reading that has consequences. Cornish writes with clarity and elegance so that there is nary a dull sentence in the book. Her wide-ranging work is at once learned and accessible, written for Dantisti but open to a larger audience.' Peter S. Hawkins, Yale Divinity School

Alison Cornish offers a compelling new take on the Commedia with modern sensibilities in mind. Believing in Dante re-examines the infernal dramas of Dante's masterpiece that alienate and perplex modern readers, offering an invigorating view of the whole Divine Comedy, bringing it to meaningful life today. Addressing the characteristics that distance an author like Dante from the modern world, Alison Cornish shows the value of critically and constructively engaging with texts that do not coincide with current worldviews. She thereby reveals how we might discover constellations by which to navigate the process of reading. Written with incisiveness and sophistication, this landmark book elucidates Dante's eminently readable universe: one where we can and must choose what we want to believe.

Introduction
1. 'So great a lover': Facts and narratives in the love stories of the lustful
2. 'Bad light': Factionalism and the Facts in the cemetery of the heretics
3. 'Never broke faith': Losing credibility in the wood of the suicides
4. 'Where your soul is pointed': Facts and values in Ulysses' quest and the examination on love
5. 'Against Her Will': Diversity of desire in the heaven of the moon
6. 'How much from the point': Saving appearances at the edge of the universe
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Theology [HRLB], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]