Description
Book SynopsisDante beyond influence is the first study to conceptualise and historicise the hermeneutic turn in Dante reception history and Victorian cultural history, charting its development across intellectual realms, agents and forms of readerly and writerly engagement. Unearthing previously unseen manuscript and print evidence, the book conducts a material and book-historical inquiry into the formation and popularisation of the critical and scholarly discourse on Dante through Victorian periodicals, mass-publishing, traditional and Extramural higher education. The book demonstrates that the transformation of Dante from object of amateur interest (
dantophilia) to subject of systematic interpretive endeavours (
dantismo) reflected paradigmatic changes in Victorian intellectual and socio-cultural history.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: What do we talk about when we talk about Dante’s reception?
1 Reading Gladstone reading Dante: Marginal annotation as private commentary
2 Ephemeral Dante: Matthew Arnold’s criticism in Victorian periodicals
3 The critic and the scholar: Christina and Maria Francesca Rossetti’s Dante sisterhood
4 ‘Everyman’s Dante’: Philip H. Wicksteed and Victorian mass readerships
5 Academic networks: Dante studies in Victorian Britain
Conclusion: From grande amore to lungo studio: rethinking the hermeneutic turn in reception history
Bibliography
Index
