Dante and the Making of a Modern Author [Hardcover]

Albert Russell Ascoli (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521882362 | ISBN-13: 978-0521882361 | Publication Date: April 21, 2008 | Edition: 1

Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri - minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring experimental poet - into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon. The text offers a comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his maturity, Monarchy and the Divine Comedy. Ascoli reveals how Dante anticipates modern notions of personalized, creative authorship and the phenomenon of 'Renaissance self-fashioning'. Unusually, the book examines Dante's career as a whole offering an important point of access not only to the Dantean oeuvre, but also to the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Dante and the Making of a Modern Author is a major work of scholarship, the result of many years of reflection and research. Its subject - the poet's profound, shifting, and self-centred obsession with 'authority' - is certainly among the most vital in present-day Dante studies; and, for a long time to come, Ascoli's book will stand as the definitive analysis of the question. Fittingly, Ascoli has written the authoritative account of Dante's lifelong engagement with auctoritas." -
Zygmunt Baranski, University of Cambridge

"In the long history of Dante studies, this is the book that was missing: an intellectual and literary biography of Dante as the first modern, vernacular 'author' of the Western tradition. A new and original book, scholarly, rigorous, and fully engaged with both Dante's culture and our own, it combines depth with breadth and, while reconstructing the complex process through which Dante achieves his position as a supreme 'author,' builds its own enduring authority."
- Lino Pertile, Harvard University

"Ascoli (Italian studies, Univ. of California, Berkeley), who has authored numerous books and articles on Dante, Machiavelli, and Ariosto, offers a magisterial treatment of Dante's evolving conception of author...Thoroughly grounded in the primary and secondary literature, Ascoli's text is accessible even to the interested nonspecialist. An important contribution to Dante studies; highly recommended..."
-T.L. Cooksey, Library Journal

"This innovative, brilliantly constructed work examines how Dante Aligheri self-consciously presented himself as an authoritative poet, theologian, literary critic, and canonical giant. Ascoli argues that Dante strove to control how others regarded him and interpreted his work, and he achieved this so effectively that generations of even the most skeptical readers have approached him a little too reverentially to be wholly objective in their criticism. Drawing on works by Hannah Arendt and Roland Barthes, Ascoli deconstructs and historicizes Dante's work, presenting a modern way of reading him that neither disregards the spirit of the Commedia nor causes it to be considered ahistorically...Summing Up: Essential."
-M. E. DiPaolo, Alvernia College, Choice

"In three decades of teaching and writing about Dante, I do not recall a more meticulously researched study, at least in English, of the Florentine poet's total oeuvre....Though wide-ranging in the Latin and Italian texts treated, this extended study nevertheless focuses tightly on the related but complicated medieval concepts of author (auctor or autore) and authority (auctoritas or autoritade).... Ascoli never shies away from presenting conflicting views or divergent scholarly interpretations of key Dantean passages. He never tires of noting how 'complex' the issues are that he himself raises. He is not afraid to pose a question and then respond that 'there are plural answers'...this book is definitely required reading for all earnest scholars of Dante's opera omnia."
Madison U. Sowell, Renaissance Quarterly

"Ascoli has produced a study that is narrow in its focus but very broad in its implications. It is the product of long rumination and the most serious of scholarship."
- The Review of English Studies

"...outstandingly erudite." -Jan G. Soffner, H-Italy

Book Description

This text offers a comprehensive study of Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority. Ascoli offers an important perspective not only on the Dantean oeuvre, but also on the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (April 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521882362
• ISBN-13: 978-0521882361
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,547,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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