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  1. Home
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  3. Dante and the Making of a Modern Author
  • Cited by 35
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
2008
Online ISBN:
9780511485718
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485718
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, European Literature, European and World Literature: General Interest, European Studies
Information

Book description

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.

Reviews

‘This brilliant beast of a book has serious designs on your attention. Beautifully written, it has all the page-turning tension of a giallo, Italian detective fiction, but the pages turn slowly since the argument is carefully plotted and highly qualified … In writing this ultimate work of Dante criticism, Ascoli inevitably courts comparisons with the ultimate author, Dante himself. Such comparisons are, for the most part, skilfully deflected by nice touches of humor and by the rare citational generosity … a magnificent book of a prize-winning kind. It attests to the singular intelligence and vigor of North American Dante studies.'

David Wallace Source: Speculum

‘Dante and the Making of a Modern Author is a brilliant work, comprehensive in scope, convincing in its conclusions, abounding in original insights, exhaustively researched, philologically rigorous, theoretically sophisticated. The volume is a permanent contribution to Dante scholarship, but it will command a wider audience; anyone interested in the medieval or modern idea of authorship will need to ponder this book. … a superb book, whose learning and intelligence do justice to the author it treats.'

Warren Ginsburg Source: Annali d'Italianistica

‘It is Albert Russell Ascoli's great merit to give the most accurate and elaborate account of the notion of authorship that Dante modeled and produced for himself. Ascoli's book is the fruit of a long and laborious scrutiny … and it is outstandingly erudite. Ascoli also has an excellent knowledge not only of the works of modern theoretical thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Mary Carruthers about literary authorship and authority, but also of the discursive figurations of auctores available at Dante's time.'

Jan Soffner Source: H-Italy Reviews

‘In three decades of teaching and writing about Dante, I do not recall a more meticulously researched study, at least in English, of the Florentine poet's total oeuvre … Though wide-ranging in the Latin and Italian texts treated, this extended study nevertheless focuses tightly on the related but complicated medieval concepts of author (auctor or autore) and authority (auctoritas or autoritade) … Ascoli never shies away from presenting conflicting views or divergent scholarly interpretations of key Dantean passages. He never tires of noting how 'complex' the issues are that he himself raises. He is not afraid to pose a question and then respond that 'there are plural answers' … this book is definitely required reading for all earnest scholars of Dante's opera omnia.'

Madison Sowell Source: Renaissance Quarterly

‘Ascoli … who has authored numerous books and articles on Dante, Machiavelli, and Ariosto, offers a magisterial treatment of Dante's evolving conception of author … Thoroughly grounded in the primary and secondary literature, Ascoli's text is accessible even to the interested nonspecialist. An important contribution to Dante studies; highly recommended.'

T. L. Cooksey Source: The Library Journal

Review of the hardback:'… innovative, brilliantly constructed work … The result is a book that presents a new way of looking at poetic and political authority, and at art that can serve as establishment propaganda or as a revolutionary force. Summing up: essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.'

M. E. DiPaolo - Alvernia College

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.'

Source: The Review of English Studies

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