Dante beyond influence is the first study to conceptualise and historicise the hermeneutic turn in Dante reception history and Victorian cultural history, charting its development across intellectual realms, agents and forms of readerly and writerly engagement. Unearthing previously unseen manuscript and print evidence, the book conducts a material and book-historical inquiry into the formation and popularisation of the critical and scholarly discourse on Dante through Victorian periodicals, mass-publishing, traditional and Extramural higher education. The book demonstrates that the transformation of Dante from object of amateur interest (dantophilia) to subject of systematic interpretive endeavours (dantismo) reflected paradigmatic changes in Victorian intellectual and socio-cultural history.

Federica Coluzzi is Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. Prior to that she was Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork. She is the co-editor of Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Translation and Reception History: The Afterlife of Dante’s Vita Nova in the Anglophone World with Jacob Blakesley for Routledge (Summer 2022). She is Associate member of the Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland. Her research encompasses reception theory and Dante studies, nineteenth-century periodicals, history of publishing and reading. Her work is published in Dante Studies, Tre Corone, Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, Nineteenth Century Prose, Studium and Strumenti Critici.

Alison Milbank is Professor at the University of Nottingham. Herresearch and teaching focuses on the relation of religion to literature and culture in the post-Enlightenment period, with particular interest in non-realist literary and artistic expression, such as the Gothic, the fantastic, horror and fantasy, especially in G. K. Chesterton and Tolkien. An interest in medievalism led to a book on Dante as received in Victorian theology, history and art. Dante continues to be a research and teaching interest. Her expertise in Gothic is primarily theological and historical as in my study of Gothic fiction from the Reformation to the end of the nineteenth century, aligning its rise and narrative tropes to Anglican theology and historiography.

For any information, email: luca.peretti@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window