About this item
The life and times of Dante's soaring poetic allegory of the soul's redemptive journey toward God. Written during his exile from Florence in the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy describes the poet's travels through hell, purgatory, and paradise, exploring the state of the human soul after death. His poema sacro, sacred poem, profoundly influenced Renaissance writers and artists such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Sandro Botticelli and was venerated by modern critics including Erich Auerbach and Harold Bloom. Dante's "Divine Comedy" narrates the remarkable reception of Dante's masterpiece, one of the most consequential religious books ever written.. Tracing the many afterlives of Dante's epic poem, Joseph Luzzi shows how it left its mark on the work of such legendary authors as John Milton, Mary Shelley, and James Joyce while serving as a source of inspiration for writers like Primo Levi and Antonio Gramsci as they faced the most extreme forms of political oppression.
About the Author
Joseph Luzzi holds a doctorate from Yale and teaches at Bard. He is the author of the memoir, IN A DARK WOOD: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (HarperCollins) , a meditation on the power of great literature to guide us in our most difficult times. Other books include MY TWO ITALIES (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) , the dramatic story of his Italian family's immigration and an insider's look at life in Italy, past and present.
An active critic, Luzzi has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, the Times Literary Supplement, and many others. His first book, ROMANTIC EUROPE AND THE GHOST OF ITALY (Yale) , received the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies, and he is also the author of A CINEMA OF POETRY: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins) . His work has been translated or is forthcoming in Italian, German, Portuguese, and Korean, and he lectures widely on art, film, and literature.
