Manuele Gragnolati Knihy

Focusing on vernacular depictions of the afterlife in pre-Divine Comedy Italy, this analysis examines works by poets like Uguccione da Lodi and Giacomino da Verona. Manuele Gragnolati offers a fresh interpretation of Dante's writings by exploring high medieval eschatology and personal identity. He delves into how medieval spirituality's concepts of body and pain shape eschatological views, highlighting the tension between the physical experiences of the soul and the ultimate need for bodily resurrection.

The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume: the role of ritual speech acts; the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category; finally, phenomena of voice, created and situated between citation and repetition, especially in forms which appropriate and transform literary tradition. The volume encompasses articles by historians and musicologists as well as literary scholars. It spans European literature from the West (French, German, Italian) to the East (Church Slavonic), vernacular and Latin; it contrasts modes of liturgical meditation in the Western and Eastern Church with secular plays and songs, and it brings together studies on the character of ‛voice’ in major medieval authors such as Dante with examples of Dante-reception in the early twentieth century.

After almost seven centuries, Dante persists and even seems to haunt the present. Metamorphosing Dante explores what so many authors, artists and thinkers from very different artistic, political, geographical and cultural backgrounds have probed in Dante's Ïuvre, and the ways in which they have engaged with it in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries through rewritings, dialogues, and transpositions. By establishing transdisciplinary routes, the volume shows that, along with a corpus of multiple linguistic and narrative structures, characters and stories that lend themselves to evocation and reactivation, Dante has provided a field of tensions in which to mirror, investigate and question one's own time. Authors explored include Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, Jacques Lacan, Thomas Mann, James Merrill, Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giorgio Pressburger, Robert Rauschenberg, Virginia Woolf.