Dante and the Making of a Modern Author

The first comprehensive study of Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority.

Albert Russell Ascoli (Author)

9780521178440, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 7 April 2011

476 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.75 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Ascoli has produced a study that is narrow in its focus but very broad in its implications. It is the product of long rumination and the most serious of scholarship.' The Review of English Studies

Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri – minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring experimental poet – into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon. The text offers a comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his maturity, Monarchy and the Divine Comedy. Ascoli reveals how Dante anticipates modern notions of personalized, creative authorship and the phenomenon of 'Renaissance self-fashioning'. Unusually, the book examines Dante's career as a whole offering an important point of access not only to the Dantean oeuvre, but also to the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.

Introduction
1. The author in history
Part I. An Author in the Works: Dante Before the Commedia: 2. Definitions: the vowels of authority
3. Language: 'neminem ante nos'
4. Auto-commentary: dividing Dante
Part II. Authority in Person: Dante Between the Monarchia and the Commedia: 5. 'No judgment among equals': dividing authority in Monarchia
6. Palinode and history
7. The author of the Commedia
Works consulted
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB], Poetry by individual poets [DCF]