Dante and the Victorians

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.

Author: Alison Milbank
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 10/01/2009
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780719081231

About the Author

Alison Milbank is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Nottingham