(1265-1321) Italian writer. Dante Alighieri is perhaps most famous for "The Divine Comedy," (which consists of "Inferno," "Purgatorio," and "Paradiso"). Read more about the life and works of Dante Alighieri.
1. Dante in Love: The World's Greatest Poem and How It Made History
by Harriet Rubin. Simon & Schuster. From the publisher: "'Dante in Love' is the story of the most famous journey in literature. Dante Alighieri, exiled from his home in Florence, a fugitive from justice, followed a road in 1302 that took him first to the labyrinths of hell then up the healing mountain of purgatory, and finally to paradise. He found a vision and a language that made him immortal."
2. Dante
by R. W. B. Lewis. Viking. From the publisher: "In 'Dante' he traces the life and complex development-emotional, artistic, philosophical-of this supreme poet-historian, from his wanderings through Tuscan hills and splendid churches to his days as a young soldier fighting for democracy, and to his civic leadership and years of embittered exile from the city that would fiercely reclaim him a century later."
3. Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah
by Mark Jay Mirsky. Syracuse University Press. From the publisher: "In this book Mirsky distinctively traces the influence on Dante of Provencal poets, medieval theologians, Dante's personal life, and the sources of his classical education to propose a radical reading of Dante. The text compounds the riddles of dream, poetry, philosophy, and Dante's concealed autobiography in his work. It treats the 'Commedia' in the spirit of its title, as a hopeful and comic vision of the other world."4. Poets' Dante: Essays on Dante by Twentieth-Century Poets
by Peter S. Hawkins (Editor), and Rachel Jacoff (Editor). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. From the publisher: "Previously published essays by some of this century's most renowned poets-Pound, Eliot, Mandelstam, Robert Fitzgerald, Borges, Merrill, Montale, Lowell, Duncan, Auden, Yeats, Charles Williams, Nemerov, Heaney-join new essays commissioned by the editors."5. Dante: A Life in Works
by Robert Hollander. Yale University Press. From the publisher: "How did the Florentine exile come to create this masterpiece? What steps in his development can possibly explain the making of this extraordinary poem? Here a preeminent Dante scholar turns to the poet's body of work -- the only real biography of Dante that we have -- to illuminate these questions. Through an exposition of Dante's other writings, Robert Hollander provides a concise intellectual biography of the writer..."6. The New Life
by Dante Alighieri. New York Review of Books. "An allegory of the soul's crisis and growth, combining prose and poetry, narrative and meditation, dreams and songs and prayers, 'The New Life' is a work of crystalline beauty and fascinating complexity that has long taken its place as one of the supreme revelations in the literature of love."7. Dante's Aesthetics of Being
by Warren Ginsberg. University of Michigan Press. From the publisher: "Despite the absence of tracts about beauty and art, aesthetic issues did command the attention of people in the Middle Ages. For Dante, however, aesthetics was the discourse of being and could not be narrowly defined. The aesthetic became the domain in which Dante considered not only form and proportion but questions of love, identity, and perfection of the self."8. Dante and the Orient
by Brenda Deen Schildgen. University of Illinois Press. From the publisher: "In 'Dante and the Orient,' Schildgen argues that Dante's treatment of the East enabled him to use the rhetoric employed in crusade narratives and other travel literature to oppose the military and polemic goals of the Crusades and to plead for the reformation of both church and state."9. Rite of Passage in the Narratives of Dante and Joyce
by Jennifer Margaret Fraser. University Press of Florida. From the publisher: "Fraser studies the changes Joyce undergoes during his experience of reading and writing the Commedia; the changes to Dante's poem that result from a Joycean reconfiguration of the poet's literary portrait; the changes we seek and undergo as readers when we are provoked into writing by the initiatory fiction of Dante and Joyce."10. Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy
by John Armstrong. W.W. Norton & Company. From the publisher: "An alluring, thoughtful reflection on why falling in love is never enough—even though we wish it could be.Gleaning surprisingly practical insights from sources as diverse as Dante, St. Augustine, and Jane Austen, John Armstrong lends a philosopher's expansive insight and his own personal humor to the often oversentimentalized topic of love."