Lectura Dantis Americana: Inferno I + II [2 B�e].

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - In very good condition. - Sehr gut und sauber. - Foreword: Ever since the mid-nineteenth century Dante�s American presence has been an imposing one. Among the great foreign writers, perhaps only Shakespeare has affected the course of American literary life as deeply as he. And if one restricts the field to those whose work has had to rely on translation to reach its widest audience, it seems clear that Dante is second not even to Homer and Virgil among the ancients, and certainly not to Cervantes and Goethe among the moderns. Perhaps because we, like the French in this, possess no single generally acknowledged national literary figure, we have tended to look beyond our shores for literary stars of the first magnitude. Whatever the cause, the rediscovery of Dante in the nineteenth century has had profound effect on American intellectual life, both within the academy and in the larger world. Longfellow (whose translation, completed in 1867, was to be a major force in the revival of American interest in Dante), Lowell, Norton, and their friends in Cambridge helped to put the Commedia into the hands of many professors, students, men and women of letters, and �common readers.� The founding of the Dante Society of America in 1881 offered confirming evidence of a widening interest in the great poet. Harvard, Dante�s most significant early academic home in America, continued in that role (one thinks of the presence of Santayana and Grandgent at the turn of the century); it was also in New England that Dante�s influence had first exercised its power on a major American writer, Hawthorne, extending eventually to Eliot and Pound. It is not my purpose to tell again an already familiar tale.* Suffice it to say that the Commedia became a text that almost every American intellectual felt called upon to confront. �Il nostro poeta� the Italians rightly call Dante. He has become ours, too. The Dante beloved of Americans was, indeed, largely indistinguishable from the towering Italian figure, at least if one inspects his first academic incarnation. American scholarship reflected basic intuitions and critical procedures developed across the water, in Italy as well as in England (where among the greater names were those of Moore and Toynbee). �Dantismo americano,� a phrase some Italians currently use to designate a critical approach which seems to some of them new, radical, and controversial, is a recent phenomenon. It traces its origin to the work of Charles S. Singleton, which began to appear shortly after the conclusion of the Second World War. Singleton�s essential contribution was to present the procedures of poetic signification in the Commedia as deriving from what Dante himself called �the allegory of the theologians.� This development was not as utterly revolutionary as Singleton himself apparently believed. He had precursors, distant (e.g., Filippo Villani) and nearer to hand (most significantly, Erich Auerbach). But it remains true that Singleton�s focusing of the debate over Dante�s mode of meaning became crucial in the self-definition of the next generation of American Dantisti, whether they welcomed or decried the positions taken by Singleton. And there seems to be little reason to believe that the immediate future will witness any significant movement away from a criticism grounded in concerns issuing from this vision of the poem�s central mode of signifying. ISBN 9780812281767