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Critics have often acknowledged Dante's influence on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. During the conflict in Northern Ireland, Dante's political and linguistic thinking showed Heaney a way of cultural reconciliation between the British and Gaelic traditions. From the early 1970s to the late 1990s, political (dis)harmony, linguistic unity, faith and poetics are some of his major themes, often explored through the reworking of passages from the Commedia. After the end of the Troubles in 1998, Dante's poetry may have taken on a new significance for the Irish author. This article therefore aims to explore Dantean intertextuality in Heaney's first peacetime collection, Electric Light (2001). Through the revival of settings, themes and motifs (particularly in the remake of 'Guido, i' vorrei'), Dante's presence seems to act as an analytical lens that shapes the poetic self, filters his literary experience, and redefines descriptive imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we draw attention to the expansive and crucial presence of Dante in two particular stories of Primo Levi's Vizio di forma, the linked tales 'Lavoro Creativo' and 'Nel Parco'. These stories imagine an idyllic afterlife realm for famous literary characters, and so are of course ripe for reading through the lens of Dante's Limbo. But we argue that there is still more to be found by expanding the scope of our inquiry to more of the Commedia, particularly in considering the dynamic between souls in Dante's Purgatory and Levi's appreciation of the scientific aspects of Dante's writings. Such a move allows for a fuller appreciation of the relationship between Primo Levi and Dante, showing how the Turinese writer creates a unique space for himself through his acts of rewriting, appropriating, and adapting Dante. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lo studio analizza l'enciclica di Benedetto XV dedicata a Dante dal titolo In Praeclara Summorum. Il testo papale, scritto nel 1921 in occasione del sesto centenario della morte del Poeta, eleva Dante, nell'Europa devastata del primo dopoguerra, a guida morale, sociale e politica dei popoli straziati dalla follia bellica. Il mio obiettivo è quello di capire le profonde ragioni che spinsero papa Benedetto XV a trasformare l'Alighieri in mistagogo e teorico politico per l'uomo contemporaneo, col potere di rigenerare spiritualmente soprattutto i giovani e giovanissimi dell'Europa uscita dalla Prima guerra mondiale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Dante's notion of 'discrezione' in Convivio I. xi, with the aim of highlighting the syncretic nature of the concept. It argues that Dante's discretion (from Latin discretio) relies upon both Aristotle and Cicero's ethical thought, thus reflecting the fluidity and the harmonising potential of the intellectual and civic culture in which Dante was immersed. This reading is thus situated within current discussion of Dante's intellectual formation within Florence, and beyond. It especially focuses on the mediating role played by Brunetto Latini's Tresor in relation to Dante's encounter with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics alongside Stoic traditions. This study also brings to light the ambivalence, and even rivalry, that seems to characterise Dante's relationship to his older master, after the poet's exile from Florence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma. While the film has received copious critical attention, most interpretations either focus on the physical and sexual violence depicted on screen or read the film as a simple metaphor for capitalist consumer culture. This article engages with Pasolini’s oft-neglected journalistic Scritti corsari (Corsair writings) to demonstrate the complex and often problematic nature of his critiques of capitalism, fully present in Salò as well. My reading of irony in Salò at once offers an understanding of the role of Pasolini’s citations of other texts in the film, explores his relationship to the work of Dante and of Ezra Pound, and examines how Pasolini anticipates certain strands of radical negativity in queer theory, particularly in the work of Lee Edelman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the characterization of blessed souls in Dante’s Commedia (1307-21) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (c. 1356-74) and Triumphi (c. 1352-74). It argues that eschatological realism - the detailed representation of souls in the afterlife - lies at the heart of these three works, each of which depicts a deceased beloved who now resides in Paradise. Dante’s Paradiso navigates a range of doctrinal and literary challenges to incorporate its blessed characters into the poem’s continuum of interlocutors. Although the Commedia culminates with a first-person, mystical experience, the structural importance of third-person voices to the canticle demonstrates the centrality of realist characterization to the overall project. Petrarch’s works, meanwhile, reject Dante’s broad and varied descriptions of beatitude but nonetheless assert a more restricted eschatological realism channelled through the interpersonal connection with Laura. The beloved’s combination of exemplarity and historicity sets up the paradigm that defines the other characters in Petrarch’s narrative, including the poetic ‘I’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the manner in which Dante'sVita Novainforms Antonio Delfini's collectionIl ricordo della Basca(1938; 1956) and the novel by Gianni Celati,Lunario del paradiso(1978; 1989; 1996), providing a thematic repertoire as well as a structural model. Reclaimed in the nineteenth century as the archetypal ‘inner autobiography’ and testimony of Dante's early loves, theVita Novais shown to be an effective model for exploring the connection between desire, memory and writing, a suitable filter – as in the cases of Delfini and Celati – for the narration of the wandering youth in search of an idealized and elusive love. At the same time, however, the anacronistic revival of the Dantean model is not without consequences: if in theVita Nova, and subsequently in theComedìa, Beatrice acts as a Master in the Lacanian sense – the law that guides Dante's entire human, spiritual and literary journey – it is modernity itself, for Lacan, that is placed beneath the sign of elision of the Master's discourse. This ‘evaporation’ of the Law is evident in works such asBascaandLunario, ‘modernity’s Vitæ Novæ’, and thus situates them in the realm of a wandering that is at the same time existential, erotic and textual. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will examine the ways in which Dante conceives of and articulates the notion of peace in the context of the Italian campaign of the Emperor Henry VII, and will suggest that the eventual failure of Henry's mission marks a clear and definitive turning-point in the poet?s thinking on this subject. It is argued that Henry's death, and his failure to establish the Empire in Italy as a strong and unifying force, led Dante to reassess his political views, and ultimately to conclude that true peace could not be realized on earth at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]