About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherHarvard University Press

ISBN-100674980832

ISBN-139780674980839

eBay Product ID (ePID)18038686756

Product Key Features

Book TitleDante's Bones : How a Poet Invented Italy

Number of Pages384 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2020

TopicEurope / Italy, General, Literary

IllustratorYes

GenreBiography & Autobiography, History

AuthorGuy P. Raffa

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height1.2 in

Item Weight20 oz

Item Length9.2 in

Item Width6.1 in

Additional Product Features

LCCN2019-049287

ReviewsAn intensively researched, gripping story of Dante's lively bones that also tells a brisk history of modern Italy. Raffa keeps a detached historian's eye on how Italian political figures used Dante to justify their own vision of the nation, the race, and the culture...Fascinating., In fiction and in fact, Dante Alighieri has been influencing the world order for centuries. Just how he's achieved global-icon stature is the subject of Guy P. Raffa's fascinating, comprehensive new book., Meeting the challenge of invigorating historical events with whodunit tones of intrigue, Guy P. Raffa's Dante's Bones delivers a fairly adventurous tale., Learned, literate, and quite entertaining...Raffa's tale touches on art and architecture, forensic science, war, public spectacle, political machination, literary trends, body snatching, air raids, and more...An excellent book for anyone with an interest in Dante, the arc of Italian history, or merely an historical adventure well told., Pulling together many threads of Dante's story, Raffa offers an engaging, informative, and original account of the material culture of the poet's epic body of work. Highly recommended., Dante's Bones is an enormous gift to readers and scholars of the poet and Italian history. With intensive scholarship in a wide variety of fields as his loom, Raffa has woven a fascinating tapestry out of 700 years of guarding, stealing, hiding, maintaining, studying, celebrating, debating, and claiming the material form and symbolic meaning of Dante's remains., Dante's Bones is at once a vivid retelling of Dante's fortunes in the centuries following his death and an important work of historical scholarship. Guy Raffa's deft prose illuminates the enduring contest over the great poet's mortal remains, providing a remarkable instance--by turns comical, deadly serious, and always captivating--of the appropriation of literary genius for political and cultural purposes., In fiction and in fact, Dante Alighieri has been influencing the world order for centuries. Just how he's achieved global-icon stature is the subject of Guy P. Raffa's fascinating, comprehensive new book ., A fascinating narrative of translation (literal), cultural appropriation, and myth making. Dante becomes a humanist ideal, a nineteenth-century prophet, and hence father for Italy, and abstraction to which all political persuasions have sought to harness themselves. The actual travails of Dante's remains also make for fascinating reading., Pulling together many threads of the Dante's story, Raffa offers an engaging, informative, and original account of the material culture of the poet's epic body of work. Highly recommended.

SynopsisA richly detailed graveyard history of the Florentine poet whose dead body shaped Italy from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the Risorgimento, World War I, and Mussolini's fascist dictatorship. Dante, whose Divine Comedy gave the world its most vividly imagined story of the afterlife, endured an extraordinary afterlife of his own. Exiled in death as in life, the Florentine poet has hardly rested in peace over the centuries. Like a saint's relics, his bones have been stolen, recovered, reburied, exhumed, examined, and, above all, worshiped. Actors in this graveyard history range from Lorenzo de' Medici, Michelangelo, and Pope Leo X to the Franciscan friar who hid the bones, the stone mason who accidentally discovered them, and the opportunistic sculptor who accomplished what princes, popes, and politicians could not: delivering to Florence a precious relic of the native son it had banished. In Dante's Bones , Guy Raffa narrates for the first time the complete course of the poet's hereafter, from his death and burial in Ravenna in 1321 to a computer-generated reconstruction of his face in 2006. Dante's posthumous adventures are inextricably tied to major historical events in Italy and its relationship to the wider world. Dante grew in stature as the contested portion of his body diminished in size from skeleton to bones, fragments, and finally dust: During the Renaissance, a political and literary hero in Florence; in the nineteenth century, the ancestral father and prophet of Italy; a nationalist symbol under fascism and amid two world wars; and finally the global icon we know today., A richly detailed graveyard history of the Florentine poet whose dead body shaped Italy from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the Risorgimento, World War I, and Mussolini's fascist dictatorship. Dante, whose Divine Comedy gave the world its most vividly imagined story of the afterlife, endured an extraordinary afterlife of his own. Exiled in death as in life, the Florentine poet has hardly rested in peace over the centuries. Like a saint's relics, his bones have been stolen, recovered, reburied, exhumed, examined, and, above all, worshiped. Actors in this graveyard history range from Lorenzo de' Medici, Michelangelo, and Pope Leo X to the Franciscan friar who hid the bones, the stone mason who accidentally discovered them, and the opportunistic sculptor who accomplished what princes, popes, and politicians could not: delivering to Florence a precious relic of the native son it had banished. In Dante's Bones, Guy Raffa narrates for the first time the complete course of the poet's hereafter, from his death and burial in Ravenna in 1321 to a computer-generated reconstruction of his face in 2006. Dante's posthumous adventures are inextricably tied to major historical events in Italy and its relationship to the wider world. Dante grew in stature as the contested portion of his body diminished in size from skeleton to bones, fragments, and finally dust: During the Renaissance, a political and literary hero in Florence; in the nineteenth century, the ancestral father and prophet of Italy; a nationalist symbol under fascism and amid two world wars; and finally the global icon we know today., Like a saint's relics, Dante's bones have been stolen, exhumed, and worshiped. Guy Raffa narrates the Florentine poet's hereafter--the physical afterlife of the writer who vividly imagined the spiritual afterlife. In the story of the bones lies the tale of Dante's evolution from Renaissance to Italian to nationalist hero, and finally global icon.

LC Classification NumberPQ4355.6.R34 2020