A towering figure in world literature, Dante wrote his great epic poem Commedia in the early fourteenth century. The work gained universal acclaim and came to be known as La Divina Commedia, or The Divine Comedy. Giuseppe Mazzotta brings Dante and his masterpiece to life in this exploration of the man, his cultural milieu, and his endlessly fascinating works.
A revolutionary of visual culture, Seymour Chwast is one of the most influential illustrators of the last half century. In his version of "Dante's Divine Comedy", Dante and his guide Virgil don fedoras and wander through noirish realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in this classic satire of human foibles. Humorous, ironic, political, and utterly unique, this "Divine Comedy" is a comics masterpiece.
In this Very Short Introduction, Peter Hainsworth and David Robey take a different approach to Dante, by examining the main themes and issues that run through all of his work, ranging from autobiography, to understanding God and the order of the universe. In doing so, they highlight what has made Dante a vital point of reference for modern writers and readers, both inside and outside Italy. They emphasize the distinctive and dynamic interplay in Dante's writing between argument, ideas, and analysis on the one hand, and poetic imagination on the other.
De vulgari eloquentia, written by Dante in the early years of the fourteenth century, is the only known work of medieval literary theory to have been produced by a practicing poet, and the first to assert the intrinsic superiority of living, vernacular languages over Latin.
Dante For Beginners takes the reader on a trip starting in hell and ending in heaven. The reader gets a quick introduction to Dante and his times. Next, the reader meets a sweet lass named Beatrice and samples a bit of his other literary offerings, such as the great feast, the Convivio. But then it's on to the big one, the Commedia, and a canto by canto description of the entire work. Characters, ideas and situations are described as they happen. The entire plan of the hereafter is simply mapped out. Dante For Beginners is a great vacation with history's greatest tourist, Dante Alighieri.
