Textual History and the “Divine Comedy”

This book examines the Commedia as a text, set in a discursive space, which can only be interpreted in terms of the other texts that it absorbs and transforms. It is only in the simultaneous reading of these voices that the voice of the Commedia exists. Texts such as the Bible, the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, the Thebaid and the Commedia itself, coalesce into a textual “history” which must be examined in retrospect in order to interpret the “events” of the poet's text. Cantos studied include: Inferno XX, Purgatorio XXI, and Inferno XIII, V, and XXVI.