Dante's Divina Commedia

FAIN: FA-11668-76

Theodore Silverstein
University of Chicago (Chicago, IL 60637-5418)

To complete a book on Dante's Divina Commedia combining a study of relevant conventions and traditions with a strictly critical analysis making numerous fresh contributions in vision literature, mythography and the history of science. In form, the book is to be organized under the headings HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, POETRY. These categories are not to be static but flexible and philosophically oriented, designed so as to lead from one to the other. Finally, the study considers three earlier works of Dante as an account of Dante's poetic progress through a variety of literary forms to that particular form which perfectly shapes and states his final masterpiece. This becomes, in turn, a detailed and formal analysis of the Divina Commedia's poetics.