Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity, by Prue Shaw
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Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity, by Prue Shaw
Best PDF Ebook Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity, by Prue Shaw
The best and most eloquent introduction to Dante for our time.
Prue Shaw is one of the world's foremost authorities on Dante. Written with the general reader in mind, Reading Dante brings her knowledge to bear in an accessible yet expert introduction to his great poem.This is far more than an exegesis of Dante’s three-part Commedia. Shaw communicates the imaginative power, the linguistic skill and the emotional intensity of Dante’s poetry―the qualities that make the Commedia perhaps the greatest literary work of all time and not simply a medieval treatise on morality and religion.
The book provides a graphic account of the complicated geography of Dante's version of the afterlife and a sure guide to thirteenth-century Florence and the people and places that influenced him. At the same time it offers a literary experience that lifts the reader into the universal realms of poetry and mythology, creating links not only to the classical world of Virgil and Ovid but also to modern art and poetry, the world of T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney and many others.
Dante's questions are our questions: What is it to be a human being? How should we judge human behavior? What matters in life and in death? Reading Dante helps the reader to understand Dante’s answers to these timeless questions and to see how surprisingly close they sometimes are to modern answers.
Reading Dante is an astonishingly lyrical work that will appeal to both those who’ve never read the Commedia and those who have. It underscores Dante's belief that poetry can change human lives.
34 illustrations Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity, by Prue Shaw- Amazon Sales Rank: #228743 in Books
- Brand: Shaw, Prue
- Published on: 2015-03-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .90" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
Review “Dante expert Shaw explains The Divine Comedy so easily and simply, she eliminates all trepidation in anyone daunted by his masterpiece… Shaw exposes the profound depth and art of poetry that encompasses so much more than language and rhythm…. Read this book to discover Dante the man, the pilgrim and the poet. Then go read his greatest poem. He’s well-worth the exploration, and Shaw is a Virgil-like guide.” (Kirkus Reviews, Starred review)
About the Author Prue Shaw is emeritus reader in Italian studies at University College London and the editor of the edizione nazionale of Dante’s Monarchia and of a digital edition of the Commedia. She lives in Cambridge, England.
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64 of 68 people found the following review helpful. Scholarly yet engaging By John L Murphy This veteran expert on Dante guides us through thematic chapters rather than a chronological commentary through the Commedia or a critical biography introducing us to the highlights of his life. The results can be challenging, but if you can keep the Guelphs from the Ghibellines straight--and this Cambridge professor makes sure we do--this study may reward those new to Dante, or those, like myself, looking for a broader overview of his career, and his influences, than a footnoted edition of The Divine Comedy might provide.Dr. Shaw appears to have spent half a century examining Dante. Therefore, she knows every facet of the poet's considerable erudition, his complicated political entanglements (we are reminded he faced torture and death for his allegiance), and the dramatic achievement that made the vernacular, after the poet had his way with Tuscan dialect and his own nimble invention of so many more words that he recorded in his verse, the standard for the emerging language of Italian, from an era when regional variations proliferated. None, as Shaw shows, as good as Dante's own, as he agrees in a show-off comparison he set down to display his own Florentine expertise. This type of confidence, growing as Dante took on more challenging models after 1300, resulted in those famed hundred masterful cantos.Reading Dante progresses by chapters on friendship, power, his life, love, time, numbers, and words. I found to my surprise those on time and numbers as engrossing as those on love and words. For, Shaw sharpens her gaze when delving into the textual acumen that displays Dante's talents at their best. You come away convinced that the more Dante took on--the journey down to hell, up past purgatory, and to the Beatific Vision and that surpassing expression itself on a human plane--the more he rose to the occasion and found language worthy of the subject, certainly one to humble any one.A few highlights from Shaw's take on Dante: he's a "good Catholic but an independent thinker," and humanity's place in the cosmos and the individual's place in society occupy his center stage. His journey downward and upward is also "the story of becoming capable of writing the poem about the journey." In examining for me the unexpected presence of public non-believers in medieval Florence, condemned to suffer infernally, we note Dante's typical symmetry, the punishments he often invents that match or invert the crime perpetrated above on earth. "Those who thought life ended in the grave are destined to spend eternity in a tomb."However, the Commedia isn't a political tract any more than it is a sermon, for Shaw promotes Dante's primary concern within the "power of words" to chastise his contemporaries and to correct the many flaws of his troubled city and a compromised Church. The vanity of Pope Boniface VIII gains special note, for his massive statue as a memorial--shown in one of the helpful illustrations throughout this volume (although on a Kindle I had to enlarge many to make out their detail, as in the delicate Botticelli line drawings of the cantos)--finds few admirers today, certainly. Shaw contrasts this with a statue of Dante she glimpsed in New York City behind shrubbery. Elsewhere she brings in Catholic schoolgirls in 1950s Australia, UN sanctions, and Siena-Florence soccer rivalries as apropos. She connects the controversies of Dante's era, often in the political realm ones that feel very distant from our own, by revealing a poet who strives to fix his society's woes by honest poetic craft.While his masterpiece may also appear arcane, Shaw notes how it's "not an account of a dream" as were other visions of the time, "but of something that happened when the poet woke up" at the start of the cantos, intriguingly. We are charmed by some of those whom Dante and Virgil meet in hell, but the moral scrutiny persists. Ulysses or Francesca may inspire our sympathy, but we must keep our guard, for Dante presents an ethical strategy that keeps ambiguity alive along with dispassionate judgment, reflecting after all divine justice as well as human frailty.The epic spirals down into earth, where Satan burrowed after he fell from heaven, only to claw itself up the slope of the soil displaces from the center of the earth, as purgatory carries Dante to its summit. And, since the cantos end with the heavenly light, and language must stop trying to capture this scene, it's a poignant "dream that one cannot recall on waking" which "leaves a trace of the emotions experienced in it. Snow melting in sunlight retains a faint tracing of an imprint on it. The oracles of the Sibyl are lost on the winds that blow away the pages they were written on."Thus, referring to dazzling images employed by Dante in his writings, Shaw leaves us with our own wonder at Dante's bold ambition and the courage taken to put down honestly his revulsion against so much corruption clerical, personal, and political around him. He also undertakes a redemptive task, to make his everyday language, enhanced by his talent and coinages, capable of taking on the next world, not to mention this one. From Here to Eternity is her aptly chosen subtitle for this study.Supplemented by notes and a very extensive bibliography, told in scholarly but engaging language, Shaw's survey of Dante should reward anyone wanting to learn more about him and his times. She makes a strong case for his linguistic range and his dogged ambition, and one will close her own book more convinced than ever, most likely, that Dante's legacy deserves to sustain its lofty power.
44 of 47 people found the following review helpful. A Doorway To Dante By Ray Dreher I discovered the Divine Comedy late last year, and it changed my life. I read a review copy of Prue Shaw's book when I was halfway through the Commedia, and it greatly improved my appreciation of the poem. If you have any interest at all in Dante, by all means read this book before or along with the Commedia. She makes the world of Dante come alive for the nonspecialist reader. The only thing disappointing about "Reading Dante" was its insufficient treatment of Dante's theology. Still, I cannot recommend the book strongly enough.
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful. Enriches the reading of Dante By Montana Skyline Despite the author's stated intention (Introduction) to convince some "liberal humanist" friends that Dante is worth reading, I suspect that most readers will be from the ranks of those already intrigued by prior reading. But whatever the draw, readers will find the experience pleasurable and their appreciation of the "Commedia" enriched. I would be surprised if most did not join me in promptly re-reading the text with a better understanding and heightened appreciation for Dante's artistry and craftsmanship.Although Shaw directs this book to the "general reader," said reader should be warned that some of the chapters delve into intricacies, e.g. of Italian dialect, that verge on the academic, while making scholarly points. That may prove an occasional distraction, although it not an accident and is not really a defect, as these digressions mostly are integral to the interpretive guidance that Shaw is offering. Certainly, these discussions are pertinent to her objective of enriching the context and reading experience by showing what Dante was up to and how he went about it. Although I am by no means a Dante Scholar, I suspect that (as she sometimes indicates) her interpretations may not always be shared by all those who are. No matter for the true general reader, as her interpretations are lucid and helpful, even if some might be debated.Prospective readers should understand that this is not a biography of Dante: Although there is a good amount of biographical material related in explicating the text, the emphasis is on the text itself. Dante's "life and times" are nicely treated in other books and, I think, add valuable context --- I would have welcomed a bit more, rather than less in this volume. That being said, Shaw succeeds in her objective of providing a richer experience for the reader of the Divine Comedy, and whether she convinces her friends or not, she admirably makes the case for the undiminished merit and pleasure of reading Dante.
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