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Dante and the Making of a Modern Author

Dante and the Making of a Modern Author

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Albert Russell Ascoli
Cambridge University Press, 4/30/2011
EAN 9780521178440, ISBN10: 0521178444

Paperback, 476 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English

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.