Dante and the Victorians [Paperback]

In this ground-breaking book, Alison Milbank explains why a comprehension of the Victorian reception of Dante is essential for a full understanding of Victorianism as a whole. Her focus on this much-neglected topic allows her to reconfigure the British nineteenth-century understanding of history, nationalism, aesthetics and gender, and their often strange intersections. The account also builds towards a demonstration that the modernist perpetuation of the Dante obsession reveals an equal continuity with many aspects of Victorianism.

The book provides not only an authoritative introduction to these important cultural themes, but also a re-reading of the genealogy of literature in the modern period. Instead of the Victorian realism challenged by Modernist symbolism's attempts to transcend linear time, Milbank offers us a contrary, continuous 'Danteism'.

For both the Victorians and the Modernists Dante is the first writer to historicise, fictionalise and humanise the eternal role, and he becomes paradoxically the means by which history, secularised fiction and a positivist humanism could be reconnected to a lost transcendent.

Dante and the Victorians provides the first comprehensive account of why the reading of Dante was central to nineteenth-century British language and culture.

Introduction

Part I History

1. The early nineteenth century: Dante and Milton among the Whigs

2. Ruskin and Dante: Centrality and de-centring

3. Dante and the Victorian distancing of history

Part II Nationalism

4. Anello Aureo: The risorgimento and English poetry

5. George Eliot, Dante and Nationalist Aspiration

Part III Aesthetics

6. The Quest of the Historical Beatrice

7. 'Drawn Within the Circle': Uses of allegory by the Rossetti family

8. Moral luck in the second circle: Dante, Francesca and the Victorian fate of tragedy

Part IV Unreal Cities

9. Life after death and the hlã‡