American Dantes

Traditions, Translations, Transformations

Zygmunt G. Baranski, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr.

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780268210366, 9780268207397
• eBook ISBN: 9780268210380
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Italian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

American Dantes provides fresh perspectives on Dante's reception and cultural impact in the United States over the past two hundred years.

American Dantes investigates the depth and breadth of Dante's American legacy from the early nineteenth century to the present. Showcasing an impressive array of approaches from renowned literary and Dante scholars, this book explores how Dante has influenced American poetry, fiction, memoir, painting, film, television, and political and religious discourse. This collection offers an extensive look at the vibrant and ongoing scholarly traditions of research, editing, translation, and creative adaptation that have established Dante's Divine Comedy as a classic in American literary culture, influencing cultural movements from transcendentalism to jazz to the Black radical tradition and more.

Contributors: David Wallace, Laura Dassow Walls, Joshua Matthews, Dennis Looney, Kathleen Boyle, Kathleen Verduin, Christian Y. Dupont, Kristina M. Olson, Henry Weinfield, Stephen Fredman, Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg, Arielle Saiber, and Peter S. Hawkins

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Further Series Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Civil Rights and Civil War: American Dantes
• Chapter 2. A Star Unlike: Dante and the American Transcendentalists
• Chapter 3. The Divine Comedy as an American Civil War Epic
• Chapter 4. Abolitionist, Confederate, Indigenous Dantes in Nineteenth-Century America
• Chapter 5. “All the verities mundane and spiritual”: Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete and Dante
• Chapter 6. “Now was your semblance made like unto this?” Dante’s Face in America
• Chapter 7. Recollecting Dante Collecting: An American Pilgrimage
• Chapter 8. “In good faith”: From Dante’s First American Poet-Translator, Thomas William Parsons, to Sandow Birk, Marcus Sanders, and Mary Jo Bang
• Chapter 9. Dante and T. S. Eliot: Desire and Form
• Chapter 10. Between Dante and Whitman: Robert Duncan’s “Dante Études”
• Chapter 11. Dante, Jazz, and the Black Radical Tradition
• Chapter 12. “The lantern of the world rises to mortals by varied paths”: Paul Laffoley (1935–2015) and Dante
• Chapter 13. Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Finding a “Spiritual” Dante in American Religious Culture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index