Dante and the Victorians

by Alison Milbank

Milbank (English, U. of Cambridge) argues that an understanding of Victorianism's reception of Dante is essential for understanding its notions of history, nationalism, aesthetics, and gender as well as the often strange intersections between any two or more of them. She offers a new genealogy of literature in modern times, substituting a continuous Dantism for the conventional tale of Victorian realism and historicism challenged by modernist symbolism. She also finds Dante to be the first writer to historicize, fictionalize, and humanize the eternal realm, and therefore the route through which history, secularized fiction, and positivist humanism can be traced to a lost transcendent. Distributed in the US by St. Martin's Press. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

277 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1998

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something almost bizarre in the Victorian cult of Dante. Why should the world's first industrialized society, at the zenith of its imperial power, and with a combatative Protetant ethic, ascribe centrality to a foreign, medieval, Catholic poet...?
...Part of the fascination with Dante is no doubt preciely because he cannpt be easily assimilated to nineteenth-century political or moral categories.
...the political centrality of Britain in the nineteenth century is accompanied for many of its thoughtful citizens by an awareness of loss and dislocation. Dante becomes a figure that both embodies this metaphysical exile, and also heals it be reversing the Victorians dilemma. Where they experience geographical centrality yet metaphysical homelessness, Dante experienced actual exile yet a unified metaphysical system.