Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

A new book by Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, has been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, covers how Dante Alighieri’s poem profoundly influenced other writers and artists in the centuries that followed, leaving its mark on authors such as John Milton, Mary Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, and shaping issues ranging from women’s identity to debates about censorship of canonical literature. “By recounting the history of the poem’s reception by readers over the centuries—from Giovanni Boccaccio and Michelangelo in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance to modernist writers and filmmakers such as Antonio Gramsci and Jean-Luc Godard, Mr. Luzzi shows what a many-headed and irreducible beast it has always been and continues to be,” writes Andrew Frisardi for the Wall Street Journal.

Post Date: 01-28-2025