Description
COMPANION TO DANTE’S DIVINE COMEDY is a comprehensive in-depth guide for the student at any level, as well as the general reader. It seeks to unlock the complexities of Dante’s meaning and to initiate the reader to the poet’s incomparable aesthetic achievement that has made this artifact such an ageless classic. The COMPANION is purposely designed, moreover, to appeal to both the Christian reader and the non-believer. To the guide book, the authors bring their combined experience of a full century with Dante; and well into their retirement they have continued to lead a group of mature adults in repeated readings of the entire COMEDY in English translation. This revised edition was prompted by years of inquiries about the long-out-of-print original edition, as well as by urgings of the reading group. It is widely recognized that the typical study guide on the market is drastically over-simplified and generally unsatisfactory. With their comprehensive, in-depth treatment, Bernardo and Pellegrini offer a guide that can serve both as an initial introduction to Dante’s poem and as a helpful manual of review. While the guide is focused primarily on those reading the COMEDY in translation, the authors know from long experience that it can be useful as well for those who venture to read the poem in the original Italian.
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Table of Contents
PREFACE
VISUAL AIDS
Dante’s Universe
Inferno
Purgatorio
Paradiso
Dante’s Journey to God
Biograph
Chronolog
Levels of Meaning
DANTE ALIGHIERI: Life and Works
BACKGROUND Why Dante?
The Medieval Vision
The Medieval Literary Mode
The Medieval Universe
The Medieval Symbolism
The Medieval Synthesis: Dante’s Comedy
THE DIVINE COMEDY
CAPSULE SUMMARY
COMPREHENSIVE SUMMARY: Canto-by-Canto, with integrated “Commentary”
Inferno
Purgatorio
Paradiso
CRITICAL ANALYSIS
The Medieval Perspective
Dante’s Perspective
The Evolution of the Comedy
Dante’s Objectivity, or Seeing with God
Some Matters of Style
CHARACTER ANALYSES
STUDY QUESTIONS
RESEARCH AREAS
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHIES
GLOSSARY-INDEX
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Author Information
Aldo S. Bernardo, B.A., M.A., Brown University, Ph.D., Harvard University; Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Italian and Comparative Literature, SUNY-Binghamton and Founder of its Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; also served as longtime Chairman of the Humanities Division of Harpur College (SUNY-Binghamton); major scholarly focus: Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio.
Anthony L. Pellegrini, A.B., M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University; Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harpur College (SUNY-Binghamton); served multiple terms as Department Chairman; major areas of interest: Medieval Italian and French Literature, and Romance Philology, with primary focus on Dante. Served for three decades as bibliographer of American Dante Studies and as Founding Editor of Dante Studies for the Dante Society of America.
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Additional Information
The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Binghamton University
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