In this accessible critical introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy Robin Kirkpatrick principally focuses on Dante as a poet and storyteller. He addresses important questions such as Dante's attitude towards Virgil, and demonstrates how an early work such as the Vita nuova is a principal source of the literary achievement of the Comedy. His detailed reading reveals how the great narrative poem explores the relationship that Dante believed to exist between God as creator of the universe and the human being as a creature of God.

‘Finally I realised that I had been practising for this job every time I wrote a quatrain . . . I had spent all this time – the greater part of a lifetime – preparing my instruments.’ The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James’s vivid translation – his life’s work and decades in the making – presents Dante’s entire epic poem in a single song. While many poets and translators have attempted to capture the full glory of The Divine Comedy in English, many have fallen short. Victorian verse translations established an unfortunate tradition of reproducing the sprightly rhyming measures of Dante but at the same time betraying the strain on the translator’s powers of invention. For Dante, the dramatic human stories of Hell were exciting, but the spiritual studies of Purgatory and the sublime panoramas of Heaven were no less so. In this incantatory translation, James – defying the convention by writing in quatrains – tackles these problems head-on and creates a striking and hugely accessible translation that gives us The Divine Comedy as a whole, unified, and dramatic work.

Dante's classic is presented in the original Italian as well as in a new prose translation, and is accompanied by commentary on the poem's background and allegory.

Dante's Divine Comedy can compel and shock readers: it combines intense emotion and psychological insight with medieval theology and philosophy. This volume will help instructors lead their students through the many dimensions--historical, literary, religious, and ethical--that make the work so rewarding and enduringly relevant yet so difficult. Part 1, "Materials," gives instructors an overview of the important scholarship on the Divine Comedy. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," describe ways to teach the work in the light of its contemporary culture and ours. Various teaching situations (a first-year seminar, a creative writing class, high school, a prison) are considered, and the many available translations are discussed.

Catherine O'Brien draws on the structure of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy to explore Martin Scorsese's feature films from Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967-69) to Silence (2016). This is the first full-length study to focus on the trajectory of faith and doubt during this period, taking very seriously the oft-quoted words of the director himself: 'My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else.' Films discussed include GoodFellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, as well as the more recent The Wolf of Wall Street. In Dante's poem in 100 cantos, the Pilgrim is guided by the poet Virgil down through the circles of Hell in Inferno; he then climbs the steep Mountain of the Seven Deadly Sins in Purgatory; and he finally encounters God in Paradise. Embracing this popular analogy, this study envisions Scorsese as a contemporary Dante, with his filmic oeuvre offering the dimensions of a cinematic Divine Comedy. Drawing on debates at the heart of religious studies, theology, literature and film, this book goes beyond existing explorations of religion in Scorsese's work to address issues of sin and salvation within the context of wider debates in eschatology and the afterlife.

This carefully crafted ebook: "Divine Comedy (Complete Edition)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. The Divine Comedy is a long narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is widely considered to be the preeminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. The narrative describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise or Heaven, while allegorically the poem represents the soul's journey towards God. Dante draws on medieval Christian theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy and the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Consequently, the Divine Comedy has been called "the Summa in verse". In Dante's work, Virgil is presented as human reason and Beatrice is presented as divine knowledge. This edition brings to you the inimitable translation of Divine Comedy by Henry Francis Cary and is accompanied by the beautiful illustrations of Gustave Doré.

"Inferno" tells the story "of those who have rejected spiritual values", of those who are lost and are unable to find the right way to salvation. It describes each sin and the corresponding punishment. It differentiates between Purgatory and Hell by presenting people begging for forgiveness and others willing to justify their sins. "Inferno" represents the Christian soul who gets to see what it really is to commit a sin and what is to be expected in the afterlife. "Inferno" is the first part of Dante Alighieri’s medieval poem "The Divine Comedy" which was written in the period 1308-1320. It depicts the nine circles of Hell and Dante’s journey through them. Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet, philosopher, language and political theorist, born in Florence in 1265. He is one of the best known poets of the Middle Ages and his masterpiece "The Divine Comedy" is considered to be a representative of the medieval world-view. "The Divine Comedy" and "The New life" were written in vernacular, i.e. the speech variety that was used in everyday life. This made the literature accessible to most people and this is mainly why Dante is called "The father of Italian language". Dante’s life was divided by poetry and politics and the relationships between secular and religious authority were topics which were often depicted in his literary works.