Waking to find himself shipwrecked on a strange shore before a dark wood, the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy realizes he must set his sights higher and guide his ship to a radically different port. Starting on the sand of that very shore with Dante, John Freccero begins retracing the famous voyage recounted by the poet nearly 700 years ago.
Freccero follows pilgrim and poet through the Comedy and then beyond, inviting readers both uninitiated and accomplished to join him in navigating this complex medieval masterpiece and its influence on later literature. Perfectly impenetrable in its poetry and unabashedly ambitious in its content, the Divine Comedy is the cosmos collapsed on itself, heavy with dense matter and impossible to expand. Yet Dante's great triumph is seen in the tiny, subtle fragments that make up the seamless whole, pieces that the poet painstakingly sewed together to form a work that insinuates itself into the reader and inspires the work of the next author. Freccero magnifies the most infinitesimal elements of that intricate construction to identify self-similar parts, revealing the full breadth of the great poem.
Using this same technique, Freccero then turns to later giants of literature- Petrarch, Machiavelli, Donne, Joyce, and Svevo-demonstrating how these authors absorbed these smallest parts and reproduced Dante in their own work. In the process, he confronts questions of faith, friendship, gender, politics, poetry, and sexuality, so that traveling with Freccero, the reader will both cross unknown territory and reimagine familiar faces, swimming always in Dante's wake.

About the Author
John Freccero is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at New York University. He is the author of Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, edited by Rachel Jacoff. Danielle Callegari received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University. Melissa Swain is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies at New York University.

Reviews
"John Freccero is one of the great dantisti of his age. Freccero's erudition is as impressive in its depth (Plato and NeoPlatonism, Augustine, Italian philology) as in its breadth (Gramsci, Derrida, Girard, the epic, the novel). Along with the erudition, moreover, there is his beautifully lucid style: The prose is remarkably clear, graceful, eloquent, illusive, and at times even epigrammatic." -- -Peter S. Hawkins Yale Divinity School "John Freccero's learned and lucid work on Dante has influenced generations of Dante scholars and others in a variety of fields. The remarkable range of allusions and analysis in this collection of essays offers a rich context for understanding key episodes of the Inferno as well as later literature engaged with comparable issues. The collection reaffirms the resonance and lasting value of Freccero's brilliant understanding of the reciprocity of theology and poetics." -- -Rachel Jacoff Wellesley College



Book Information
ISBN 9780823264285
Author John Freccero
Format Paperback
Page Count 286
Imprint Fordham University Press
Publisher Fordham University Press