Dante's British Public
Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:24th Jul '14
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- Paperback£40.99(9780198812395)
This is the first account of Dante's reception in English to address full chronological span of that process. Individual authors and periods have been studied before, but Dante's British Public takes a wider and longer view, using a selection of vivid and detailed case studies to record and place in context some of the wider conversations about and appropriations of Dante that developed in Britain across more than six centuries, as access to his work extended and diversified. Much of the evidence is based on previously unpublished material in (for example) letters, journals, annotations and inventories and is drawn from archives in the UK and across the world, from Milan to Mumbai and from Berlin to Cape Town. Throughout, the role of Anglo-Italian cultural contacts and intermediaries in shaping the public understanding of Dante in Britain is given prominence - from clerics and merchants around Chaucer's time, through itinerant scholars, collectors and tourists in the early modern period, to the exiles and expatriates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The final chapter brings the story up to the present, showing how the poet's work has been seen (from the fourteenth century onwards) as accessible to 'the many', and demonstrating some of the means by which Dante has reached a yet wider British public over the past century, particularly through translation, illustration, and various forms of performance.
Nick Havely charts in exemplary detail how Dante's texts first came to the British Isles ... and surveys what was for some centuries a restricted, mainly aristocratic readership. * Peter Hainsworth, Times Literary Supplement *
The whole volume is fascinating, full of original scholarship and full of interest ... Dantes British Public is a very substantial and original contribution to Dante studies, and a really important resource for other scholars in this field ... Meticulously footnoted, with a full bibliography, this will be a truly generative book, encouraging others to develop the many leads offered throughout to further research. * Alison Milbank, English Historical Review *
A compelling narrative that ... moves easily between the disciplines of literary criticism, bibliography, reception studies, and art history ... This study will become a standard text for scholars interested in the ebb and flow of Dante's reputation. * Will Bowers, Romanticism *
A masterly contribution to this field ... Havely's study offers deeply contextualized and original readings of a multitude of encounters with Dante ... It deserves to become an essential point of reference for all scholars of Dante's reception and Anglo-Italian relations. * Guida Armstrong, Italian Studies *
Havely's ambitious book is an informative work on the wide scope of Dante's reception and popularity ... it is recommended to scholars interested in the reception of Italian literary works abroad, and in the historical progress of Dante's fame. * Nicoletta Asciuto, Notes and Queries *
Readers curious about the expanding English impacts of this poem, as we now mark seven centuries since it appeared, will consult Havely with appreciation for the careful research he has compiled here. * John L. Murphy, popmatters.com *
In this new book [Nick Havely] develops a comprehensive line of study which runs from the fourteenth century to the present ... The result is a highly painstaking, judicious and concise study. * Nicola Gardini, Il Sole 24 Ore *
The book coincides with a great wave of reception studies exploring the uses and abuses of the past over the course of time, but it is much more than a cultural history of Dante's Anglo-Saxon afterlife. Tracing the physical travels of books - where they originated and arrived - Havely aims to reconstruct the material geography of Dante's anglicization: from Milan to Mumbai, from Berlin to Cape Town. * Stefano Jossa, Il Manifesto *
ISBN: 9780199212446
Dimensions: 240mm x 165mm x 29mm
Weight: 726g
374 pages