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Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.52.3.0636

1528-4212

Lorenzo Valterza,

Anarchism and Radical Politics

As its title suggests, Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century focuses on questions surrounding the creation of national identity primarily in Europe, while also engaging extensively with North America, India, and Turkey. Editors Aida Audeh and Nick Havely summarize the volume's focus nicely when they write that the contributors have tried “to give close attention to the malleability of the Dante-myths within economies of meaning that may relate to national identities during the ‘long nineteenth century’” (2). In this, the collection succeeds admirably; its four principle sections (“Risorgimento: Italian National Identity,” “National Interests and Appropriations,” “Emerging Powers,” and “Recovering/Redefining Identities”) address topics as various as Marxist appropriations of Dante; issues related to gender and the human body; race and identity; colonialism; Dante's literary and political influence on postcolonial revolutionaries; and his role in English efforts to create a national literature.In section 1 Joseph Luzzi explores Ugo Foscolo's turn from Petrarch to Dante in his attempts to forge a new Italian national identity. Luzzi argues that, while Petrarch offered poets an imitable model, Foscolo instead recognized in Dante a political model that helped him articulate his sense of italianità. This move preceded a similar, though national one. Stefano Jossa examines Italy as a literary construction and takes up the related question of the divergent fates of Dante's statuses as literary and political icon among Italian revolutionaries. Communists reimagined Dante as a patriotic fighter for freedom, stripping him of his Catholic identity and bestowing him instead with a secular political agenda. Antonella Braida maps Giosuè Carducci's changing relationship with Dante as a means of tracing how the latter became so central to nineteenth-century attempts to create sense of nation. Beatrice Arduini examines the poet's new place in nineteenth-century Italian education, in particular in light of the new (and enduring) editorial standards imposed by Michele Barbi. Graham Smith's essay demonstrates how the veneration of physical landmarks—in this case the stone where Dante allegedly used to sit—contributed to the creation of a new Italian identity by providing its citizens a tactile connection with the poet himself. Michael Caesar and Nick Havely examine how the Dante performances by Gustavo Modena on the English stage contributed to the creation of the identity of the nineteenth-century Italian political exile. This initial collection of essays sets the stage for those that follow by offering a collection of diverse themes, bound by a restricted geographical and political framework, in this case, Italy and England.The second section, “National Interests and Appropriations,” carries the discourse beyond Italy and into a broader European context. Aida Audeh examines how Dante's importance to French national identity changed, following the developing political needs of republic and monarchy alike. The former found in Dante an ideal for citizen as homme public, while the latter made of him a grande homme that better exemplified the ideals of Napoleonic rule. James W. Thomas looks at Dante's reception in later Occitan literature, specifically in the figure of Antoine Fabre d'Olivet. Thomas argues that d'Olivet's “Cant Rouyaû, al Prouz é Noble Roumiû de Provença,” despite its apparent status as a “minority nationalist” appropriation, is in fact a much more nuanced attempt by Fabre to find a place for his Occitan past in his status within the modern French state. Diego Saglia examines the idea of nation expressed by three female authors in England: Anna Seward, Felicia Heman, and Mary Shelley. Saglia presents a problematic Dante, one whose foreign status presented considerable difficulties for figures like Seward, as it threatened notions of a British national literature that she and her fellow poets strove to establish and protect. Indeed, for Seward, the important object was to mitigate Dante's non-Englishness in order to insulate the national poetical tradition from foreign influence. Julia Straub studies appropriations of Beatrice for Victorian notions of gender and nation. Straub highlights an apparent paradox within the texts of such writers as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Walter Savage Landor, whereby the Victorian public found in Dante a myth of a stable worldview as imagined via medieval unity and wholeness, but while simultaneously recasting him in alignment with their aesthetic and moral preferences.The essays of the following section, “Emerging Powers,” examine Dante's reception in Germany and the United States. Eva Hötler's contribution examines the critical lineage that ultimately brought Dante to the German university, extending from the authors of the Enlightenment, through the romantics. Christian Y. Dupont asks how Charles Eliot Norton, despite his own ambivalence toward Christianity, found within Dante studies (and in particular its aesthetics) an alternative to the cultural materialism he found so threatening. Kathleen Verduin addresses American ambiguity toward European cultural past by looking at Ralph Waldo Emerson's engagement with Dante. On the one hand, she argues, Emerson and his circle saw in their study of Dante a means of continuity with European literary heritage. These early American Danteists occasionally regarded this continuity as problematic, as it also threatened their desire to assert a distinctly American character. Dennis Looney's contribution examines Dante's appeal to the forging of an African American identity. Along with a historical orientation, Looney analyzes Henrietta Cordelia Ray's poem Dante, proposing it as a key text from a historical moment in which African American readers began appropriating and adapting European literary traditions in order to create a unique identity.The essays that constitute “Recovering/Redefining Identities” address Dante within the political environment of Ireland, India, and Turkey. George Talbot studies Dante's importance within the academic circle of James Caulfeild, perhaps the earliest English-speaking Danteist. Talbot argues that, as a pre-Reformation figure, Dante's adversity to absolutism and political corruption offered to Caulfeild and his fellow intellectuals a critical authority and legitimacy for their own political agenda. Brenda Deen Schildgen studies how the British policy of imposing its own education system on India provided a model to Bengali revolutionaries seeking a national identity. By emphasizing the importance of medieval history as a locus for “true” national identity, the British educational model inadvertently encouraged the revolutionaries to look to their own, precolonial past for a separate identity. Cüneyd Okay looks at Dante's arrival in Turkey in the last part of the nineteenth century via French translations. However, the Commedia's diffusion and appeal were sharply limited because of its portrayal of the Muslim prophet, Muhammad. The arrival of the second declaration of the Constitution in 1908, along with a desire to Westernize Turkish public institutions, led to a more positive reappraisal of the poeta fiorentina.The collection includes two additional items: an epilogue, in which Nick Havely studies Dante's influence on early Italian cinema, and an appendix by Maria Ann Roglieri concerning Dante-influenced music.This overview gives some indication of the range of fields of study included in this volume: philology, social and intellectual history, reception studies, and critical theory. While these essays result in large part from a conference at the University of York (2008) and the International Congress of Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo (2007 and 2010), the vast area covered by these contributions necessitates that they rarely engage in direct critical dialogue with one another. Of course, such interaction is clearly outside of Audeh and Havely's project. In the introduction they write, “No treatment of Dante's multifarious presence during the nineteenth century can claim to be comprehensive” (5). Indeed, the volume offers a rich thematic selection of essays that show us just how implausible such a comprehensive treatment would be.The collection of essays originates in a geographic center, Italy, before emanating outward along pathways demarcated by political entities. Thus, following Italy, the area of discussion passes to Britain and France, whose political unifications were already long established. The political framework creates some interesting editorial choices, such as with Germany, which finds itself the subject of a single essay in the third section, a grouping otherwise exclusively concerned with Dante in the United States. In the final section, one might initially find Ireland, India, and Turkey to be strange bedfellows; however, within the thematic outline created by Audeh and Havely, the combination makes perfect sense.The entire collection is scrupulously edited, intuitively organized, and invitingly presented. Scholars will find a comprehensive general index to the entire work, along with bibliographies for each essay. This book will appeal to a broad selection of cultural scholars: nineteenth centuryists; scholars of gender; Risorgimento studies; colonial and postcolonial studies. For those who study Dante in periods predating the nineteenth century, the essays assembled by Audeh and Havely offer a salutary reminder that, along with primary sources, secondary literature and criticism also bear their own prejudices and the concerns from the environment in which they were composed—an idea expressed perhaps most concisely by Arduini when she writes, “Cultural memory is, however, highly selective, and later readers and writers responded to Dante and his legacy by tailoring him up to their own contexts” (70).