Dante For the New Millennium

Twenty five essays from a wide range of contributors constitute a state of the survey of Dante scholarship and a manifesto for understanding one of the world's greatest poets. The fruit of a historic conference called by the Dante Society of America, they confront a range of important questions: what theories, methods and issues are unique to Dante scholarship? How are they changing? What is the essence of the distinctive American Dante tradition? Why - and how- do we read the pot in today's global, postmodern culture? From John Ahern writing on the first copies of "Comedia" to Peter Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff on Dante after modernism, the essays shed light on Dante's texts, his world and what we make of his legacy.