1st Edition

Dante Alive Essays on a Cultural Icon

Edited By Francesco Ciabattoni, Simone Marchesi Copyright 2023
    376 Pages 76 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    376 Pages 76 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    The essays collected here join in, and contribute to, the current reflection on Dante’s vitality today in a critical, multidisciplinary vein. Their intervention comes at a particularly sensitive juncture in the history of Dante’s global reception and cultural reuse. Dante today is as alive as ever. A cultural icon no less than a cultural product, Dante’s imaginative universe enjoys a pervasive presence in popular culture. The multiformity of approaches represented in the collection matches the variety of the material that is analyzed. The volume documents Dante’s presence in genres as different as graphic novels and theater productions, children’s literature, advertisements and sci-fi narratives, rock and rap music, video- and boardgames, satirical vignettes and political speeches, school curricula and prison-teaching initiatives. Each chapter combines a focused attention to the specificity of the body of evidence it treats with best analytical practices. The volume invites collective reflection on the many different rules of engagement with Dante’s text.

    Table of Contents

    Lists of figures

    List of contributors

    Acknowledgments

    Editors’ Introduction (Francesco Ciabattoni & Simone Marchesi)

    Part 1: Visuality.

    1. Doré’s Dante: Influence, Transformation and Reinvention in Illustrations (Deborah Parker)
    2. Dante’s Comedy and Comics (Marco Arnaudo)
    3. Dante and Contemporary African Art (Franziska Meier)
    4. Reflections on Illustrating Dante’s Comedy in the 21st Century (Mika Provata-Carlone)

      Part 2: Multimediality.
    5. Hip-Hop, Rock, and Heavy Metal Dante (Francesco Ciabattoni)
    6. Dante: Cinema and Television (Antonio Rossini) 
    7. Dante on Stage (Sara Fontana)
    8. Dante in American Science Fiction (Arielle Saiber)

    9. Part 3: Market Availability.

    10. Dante and the Divine Comedy for Children and Young Adults: Medievalism and the Young Reader (Filippo Fonio)
    11. "‘De vulgari ‘ludo-quentia’": Dante, Games, and Pop Culture (Brandon Essary)
    12. The Hell Franchise: Dante’s Comedy in American Marketing (Elizabeth Coggeshall)
    13. Benigni’s Dante: From the Piazza to the Quirinale (Carmelo Galati)

    14. Part 4: Versatility.

    15. Sing Sing to Solliciano: Reimagining Dante’s Justice Behind Bars (Ron Jenkins)
    16. Hell on Earth: Dante in Political Circles (Akash Kumar)
    17. The Icon, the Exile: Dante and Contemporary Italian Street Art (Macs Smith)
    18. Dante in Italian Secondary Schools (Natascia Tonelli) 

    19. Part 5: Liminality.

    20. Stripping the Poem: Emilio Giannelli in the Corriere della Sera (Simone Marchesi)
    21. General Bibliography
    22. Index

    Biography

    Francesco Ciabattoni is Full Professor of Italian at Georgetown University.

    Simone Marchesi is an Associate Professor of French and Italian at Princeton University.